Managing those haunting voices : a student and supervisor in dialogue

While the individual student fittingly claims credit for authoring a thesis., the product itself might also be seen to represent the effects of the range of voices that a student is called on to assess, negotiate, and whip into shape. There are at least three discernible voices in play. First, there is the student's voice with its emerging authority fashioned through a process of intense anxiety, 'forged in fire' as Williams and Lee (1999) put it. Second, there is the supervisor's voice and its careful developmental view on the interactions between the research student, the thesis., the research community, and the bureaucratic requirements of the institution. And third, there are the demands of the disciplinary field(s) with particular mode(s) of constituting objects for inquiry, knowledge production, representation, and truth making. For us (Sarah-student and Tai-supervisor), there have been at least two additional and significant socio-material contexts that insinuate themselves as voices on, and through, the thesis. One belongs to the pull of the profession-in this case, Physiotherapy-and its orientation to the clinical practice life-world of evidence-based patient care. The other is the intense pressure on doctoral students who are also academic staff to produce research outputs in line with the intensification of the accelerated academy (Vostal, 2016). These contexts offer up a strange and contradictory amalgam of voices that haunt and circulate throughout the journey for us both.