Imagining a Ph.D. writer's body grappling over pedagogy

Although Bell Hooks argues that “the public site of institutional learning was a site where the body had to be erased, go unnoticed” (191), I suspect that particular kinds of bodies have emerged as requiring attention: bodies marked as “different” within academic discourse. It is not my intention here to directly engage with the literature around the “body,” but rather to reflect on the ways that the pedagogical positioning of my identity within the Ph.D. has occurred primarily through taking notice of the body. This chapter will foreground some of the issues I have been thinking about and draw out some of the assumptions I have been privy to during the course of my candidature. I draw attention to them because they are issues that matter to the way I have conceptualized the Ph.D. and the subsequent expectations of supervisory and institutional engagements.