Intergenerational bodies : women's knowledge production in supervisory relations

This chapter is a story of women’s experiences of academia, written in the form of letters between doctoral supervisor, Margaret, and newly completed doctoral student, Sarah. In these letters, they draw out the matter of life in women’s knowledge production by engaging in a dialogue about their supervisory exchanges surrounding Sarah’s doctorate, examining an artful practice of everyday life, created with body/place writing from a research blog. In these exchanges, Margaret remembers past and present as together they examine the moments and movements, spaces and intensities, of intergenerational knowledge production in women’s doctoral supervisory relations. They ask how individual and collective research is shaped, by what connections and reconfigurations, in the exchanges of everyday lives? Musing on Lather’s (1991) feminist classifications of qualitative research, and Iris van der Tuin’s (2009) intergenerational cartography of new materialism, they turn to post-qualitative research and bodies as sites of knowledge formation. Situated within place, time and matter, female body writing is offered as a possible frame for representing the chaotic, non-linear, non-dichotomous knowledge-making that jumps between generations in female doctoral relations.