Love and pedagogy in doctoral supervision: a duoethnography navigating complex positionings within decolonising contexts

This article contributes to understandings of how decolonising, hypercomplex contexts can entail challenges and opportunities for supervisors and supervisees, including personal and professional growth, socio-cultural dis-/connections, economic or health-related concerns. Increased complexities of supervisory positionings and relationships are influenced by changing institutional requirements, pluralistic understandings of knowledge, and workloads, recently compounded by the exponential impacts of a global pandemic. We offer insights from engagement in a critical, collaborative dialogue and elaborate on our process, contributing a structured example within the methodology of duoethnography, an approach that foregrounds reflections as resources in critical inquiry. We structured our systematic analysis and reflections about the supervision process by explicitly locating and sharing subjective experiences from each of our positionings within intersecting individual, institutional and structural contexts. Collaborative and ethnographic methodologies are used increasingly in educational research, and we contend that this approach can offer valuable insights for ongoing personal and professional development as educators, learners and researchers. We consider affective dimensions of supervision, recalling Freire's 'pedagogy of love' and argue that collaborative analysis engendering vulnerability offers opportunities to empower and inform the increasingly complex lives and work of supervisors and supervisees.