Abstract:
Globalisation has produced contradictory processes that promote the movement of people and ideas across geographical and epistemological boundaries yet continue to reinforce the dominance of white, Western knowledge production. However, globalisation may yet be the unwitting source of new intellectual labour responsible for generating new theoretic-linguistic knowledge. This paper explores the possibilities presented by the increasing presence of Indigenous and ‘non-Western’ students in white, Western universities by drawing upon a range of postcolonial and Indigenous theories (Smith, 1999; Chakrabarty, 2007; Nakata, 2007). This paper investigates how research candidates and supervisors might challenge deficit discourses about superdiversity and activate the transformative possibilities inherent in the presence of Indigenous, Pacific, immigrant, refugee and international students in white, Western universities. After clarifying the key terms we are working with, we address some challenges globalisation raises for Indigenous and non-Western research candidates, where cultural difference is rendered as a problem. We analyse the effects of ‘nice’ white colonialism in doctoral education (Mitchell & Edwards, 2013). We then discuss the methods of transcultural knowledge co-construction that we, as a new co-research team, are seeking to adopt as we try push for intellectual space in the Academy for the other thoughts and renegade knowledges (Manathunga, 2014; Qi, 2015). This includes providing vignettes of the recent PhD experiences of two authors from Indigenous and Chinese perpectives. Finally, we propose a series of mutually beneficial, transformative ways of engaging in doctoral supervision that nurture the vā (Refiti, 2013) or space of social relations of research education that might activate and mobilise Indigenous and non-Western research candidates’ multilingual capabilities and theoretic-linguistic contributions to knowledge.