Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Big love: Managing a team of research supervisors

Cally Guerin, Ian Green and Wendy Bastalic

Traversing the doctorate: situating scholarship and identifying issues

The scholarship attending doctoral study and supervision is growing rapidly, yet in many ways successful approaches to traversing the doctorate remain idiosyncratic, even mysterious. Accordingly, it is timely to situate the terrain occupied by that scholarship, and to identify the accompanying issues and proposed strategies for engaging with those issues. This situating and identification draw on literature about doctoral study and supervision distilled from the sometimes divergent perspectives of students, supervisors and administrators. The chapter also outlines the book’s structure and organising questions, and explains the techniques for maximising its rigour. From that perspective, traversing the doctorate emerges as a fundamentally worthwhile, yet complex and multifaceted, enterprise that warrants ongoing evaluation and continuing professionalisation