‘You’ve always seen me as a person first’: An autoethnography on humanising PhD supervision

Abstract

As a black South African student from a disadvantaged background, my journey through doctoral studies at a historically white university revealed the complex, simultaneous dynamics of humanising and dehumanising processes within supervisory relationships. This autoethnography examines how supervisory relationships operate within contested institutional terrain, challenging linear transformation narratives through Ubuntu philosophy and Kronenberg’s humanisation-dehumanisation continuum.
Through analysing 25 of my personal diary entries spanning four years of my doctoral degree, I trace five interconnected themes that reflect the negotiation of contradictory institutional dynamics within academic spaces. The findings reveal how spatial negotiations, epistemic tensions and institutional fragmentation coexisted with authentic mentorship, safe space creation and strategic agency development. Rather than a linear movement from exclusion to inclusion, I experienced ongoing navigation of spaces marked by constraint and the possibility for agency.
My supervisors’ humanising practices operated within rather than external to colonial structures. This supervision exemplified Ubuntu’s relational ontology where authentic relationships emerge through rather than despite contradiction and tension, enabling strategic navigation of institutional contradictions through accumulated relational practices.
Contribution: This autoethnography illustrates how supervisory relationships function as contested spaces where humanising and dehumanising processes operate simultaneously. The study reveals how Ubuntu’s recognition of relational complexity enables strategic agency development within historically white institutions through interpersonal practices that create micro-sites of care within persistently harmful structures. It offers practical insights for trauma-informed supervision while acknowledging that transformative relationships provide tactical resistance rather than systemic transformation, contributing to broader decolonial efforts through accumulated acts of humanising praxis.