Universities are multilocal and multicultural spaces of interaction and engagement where academic identities are constructed or co-constructed. Multilocality emanates from the diverse disciplines, knowledge, and practices that take place in a university, while multiculturality is inevitably brought by people with individual and shared cultures in a university. Unfortunately, some knowledge gets marginalized, diluted, or completely forgotten in such multiplicity. In this chapter, the author focuses on doctoral supervision as one of the locals of a university where the close interaction between or among students and individual or a group of supervisors can enable the reclaiming of knowledges. However, this possibility has not been adequately explored. Instead, supervisors expose their doctoral candidates to knowledge that has historically been idolized and any alternative is deemed inadequate. The author challenges this norm and argues that supervisors may learn from their students to reclaim the African epistemologies.
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What can be learned if one assumes spaces to be multilocal and asks, for example, how the different cultures of family spaces can be, which atmospheres they shape for the different members of the family, or how they arise through co-present, or even virtual or imaginative, relationing? (Engel & Fritzsche, 2019: 1)
In this chapter, I contribute a viewpoint that universities are multilocal spaces, not only physically as when considering various campuses of one university, but also epistemologically and in practice. Literally, multilocality is a situation where “one’s daily experiences, including both work and leisure time, occur in diverse physical and virtual locations” (Marino & Lapintie, 2020: 129). In this chapter, however, I see this concept of multilocality as prevalent in universities where various practices take place and produce knowledge. I focus on doctoral supervision as one of the locals of a university as it brings together students and one or a group of supervisors with individual or shared cultures that can contribute to academic identity construction or co-construction. How, then, can the different and shared cultures be resourceful in developing decolonised academic identities through doctoral supervision? This is the question that drives the discussions in the chapter. In other words, I regard doctoral supervision as a local that can provide a space for the decolonisation of epistemologies as it allows interaction and engagement among the people (those in the supervision family). Depending on what people do, what they believe and how a university space enables (or constrains) them to become, doctoral supervision can shape the atmosphere of epistemological decolonisation. Thus, I will argue that the multilocality of university spaces is restricted by the oppressive colonial agendas that restrain academic freedom and thinking towards academic identity construction and co-construction through doctoral supervision. I will also advance the thinking towards an understanding that, in decolonising spaces, it is not only the students that develop academically, but the supervisors as well.
As an African female doctoral supervisor, in this chapter I draw my arguments from those before me who are uncomfortable with the Western/Northern ways of doctoral supervision which are informed by neoliberalist notions of performativity and quantifiable targets, managerialism, audit and surveillance. I ask, whose culture is being perpetuated in those kinds of spatial practices (doctoral supervision)? How are indigenous and local ways of knowing advanced (or silenced) in those spatial practices – what ideologies dominate? Therefore, what informs the academic identities that get produced and reproduced? How are those identities likely to transcend (or not) the colonial project of silencing indigenous and local knowledges in doctoral education and supervision?
The chapter contributes to the discussions regarding the intersecting sites between postcolonialism and culturalism (Grossberg, 1996; Clarke, 2004; Manathunga, 2014, 2019; Simons & Dei, 2012), by adding spatiality and academic identities to the discourses pertaining to the decolonial project through doctoral education and supervision. It takes an understanding that decolonisation – epistemic decolonisation – is not the discarding of western knowledges, but “the diversification of thought” (Mitova, 2020: 192) whereby local and indigenous knowledges are at the centre. It argues that, in pursuit of decolonised higher education in Africa and other parts of the world, doctoral education (as an institutional local) can be a suitable avenue for the family members (students and supervisors) to think and rethink who they are, who they are becoming, and how they are becoming. In other words, they are able to consider how the space (in the form of the people they interact with, polices and guidelines) and cultures enable or constrain their becoming. This situation is enabled by the fact that, by design, universities are cross-national and multicultural in terms of the origins of students and supervisors who compose an element of a university space. As Phelps, (2026: 3) argues,