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.
Keywords: humanising praxis; doctoral supervision; autoethnography; decolonial education; South African higher education.
Introduction
Doctoral education is an important site for knowledge production, academic identity formation and the development of future scholars (Akala 2021). In South Africa, the doctoral journey is shaped by enduring legacies of apartheid and colonialism, with historical and structural inequalities continuing to influence access, experiences and outcomes for students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds (Gumbo, Knaus & Gasa 2024; Otu & Mkhize 2018). Despite post-apartheid policy reforms aimed at broadening access and fostering transformation, institutions of higher learning often remain entangled in practices that reproduce exclusion and marginalisation, making them ongoing spaces where epistemic violence is enacted (Kiguwa 2014). Exclusionary academic cultures, limited access to scholarly networks and the marginalisation of diverse epistemologies contribute to alienation and attrition (Riva, Gracia & Limb 2022; Otu & Mkhize 2018).
The doctoral supervisory relationship plays a critical role in either disrupting or reinforcing past inequities. Effective supervision has been identified as crucial in mitigating attrition and fostering scholarly development (Dericks et al. 2019; Orellana et al. 2016). However, for many black South African students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the doctoral experience remains marked by exclusion, epistemic violence and psychological distress (Maistry & Le Grange 2023; Riva et al. 2022). These experiences are often shaped by supervisory models rooted in Eurocentric traditions that may overlook or misrecognise the realities and needs of marginalised groups (Kessi, Marks & Ramugondo 2021). However, these models are not monolithic, as individual supervisors may exercise varying degrees of agency in navigating and potentially reworking dominant norms. The challenges in doctoral education reflect broader patterns of inequality in South African higher education, where coloniality and the Bantu Education Act’s systematic denial of quality education to black South Africans continue to cast a long shadow over contemporary institutional structures (Chisholm 2017; Mabaso, Jaga & Doherty 2023). Exclusionary practices hinder students’ academic growth and can contribute to psychological distress and subsequent attrition (Otu & Mkhize 2018).
Despite supervision’s central role in postgraduate research, the theorisation of its pedagogical role in fostering transformative academic experiences remains insufficient (Polkinghorne et al. 2023). Research has largely focused on technical aspects, such as research output, thesis completion rates and writing proficiency (Akala 2021; Ardiles, Bravo González & González Weil 2023), while paying insufficient attention to the lived experiences of students and the potential for supervision to serve as a space for humanising,1 decolonial engagement (Akala 2021; Rispel 2023; Riva et al. 2022). This technocratic framing risks depoliticising supervision and overlooking its role as a relational, affective and power-laden practice. This limited focus obscures the transformative potential of supervision as a means of counteracting institutional dehumanisation through intentional engagement with power, positionality and epistemic justice.
This study explores how humanising supervisory practices can serve as catalysts for transformation in the doctoral journey of students from historically marginalised backgrounds. These students often navigate historically white institutions that were not built with them in mind. Through an autoethnographic exploration, I examine my experience as someone whose intersecting identities – shaped by race, class, geography and educational background – positioned me as an outsider within elite academic spaces, I analyse how the supervisory relationship can be mobilised to navigate complex power dynamics and institutional barriers to create spaces for authentic scholarly development.
By exploring the complex negotiations between dehumanising and humanising dynamics that characterise doctoral supervision within postcolonial institutional contexts, this research illuminates specific strategies that contribute to context-sensitive and empowering mentorship within postcolonial academic contexts. The study develops Kronenberg’s (2018) framework of humanising praxis to analyse movement along the dehumanisation-humanisation continuum, highlighting how such movement is negotiated relationally and unevenly within institutions marked by colonial inheritances. This analysis demonstrates how supervisory practices can facilitate transformation even within persistently colonial institutions. The study provides an important contribution towards understanding how theoretical ideals of transformation can be translated into relational, situated and practical supervisory approaches that support students from historically marginalised backgrounds.
The article proceeds with an exploration of my positionality and the complex ways my identities were constructed, challenged and reconstructed throughout my doctoral journey. This is followed by the theoretical framework, examining humanising praxis (Kronenberg 2018; Kronenberg & Dlamini 2024; Ramugondo 2025) and its relevance in transformative doctoral supervision. I then detail the study methodology, which centres on the analysis of personal diary entries. Next, I present findings organised around experiences of institutional dehumanisation and supervisory humanisation, while tracing their interconnections and tensions. I conclude by discussing implications for supervisory practice in South African higher education and beyond.
Positionality
My doctoral journey unfolded as a complex negotiation of identity across multiple dimensions, where my understanding of what it meant to be ‘Black’, ‘South African’ and a ‘scholar’ was continually constructed through institutional encounters. I started my doctoral journey identifying primarily as an African female student – until the overwhelming whiteness of the space forced me to recognise and claim my position as ‘Black’ within South Africa’s persistent racial categories. I actively claimed and reclaimed these positions while navigating a historically white university as a first-generation doctoral student from rural KwaZulu-Natal. My formal educational biography begins in quintile one public school, where high achievement was encouraged, but the pathway to higher education remained fragile, shaped more by socio-economic constraints than by academic ability. This bred a persistent precarity complex – a sense that success was always conditional and could be easily undone by forces beyond my control. My introduction to higher education was through a historically black institution where I completed both my undergraduate and master’s degrees in Human Nutrition. There, race lived unmarked in my experience as I existed primarily as ‘a student’ among a student body that mostly mirrored my own socio-economic background, where being African was the norm rather than a position requiring declaration. Any negative encounters I experienced as a postgraduate student were internalised as personal failure rather than systemic neglect, reflecting internalised oppression (Fanon 2008). This positioning emerged from multiple sources including, my rural schooling which instilled narratives of gratitude for educational ‘opportunities’ rather than rights; my working-class background that reinforced deference to institutional authority; and my successful navigation of my undergraduate institution through conformity which became a learned survival strategy. What might be termed ‘inherited marginalisation’ was thus both structurally imposed through material constraints and actively constructed through my own strategic choices to remain invisible and compliant.
The transition to doctoral studies at a historically white institution forced confrontation with racialised difference. My identification as a ‘Black South African woman’ became acutely salient as I navigated spaces where I was the first black South African PhD scholarship recipient in my department’s history. Yet this positioning was not merely imposed; it became a strategic location from which to observe institutional dynamics without immediate pressure to assimilate, offering a vantage point to recognise both the power and fragility of institutional norms. My doctoral studies were in a department of management studies, on the topic of ‘Advancing workplace support for breastfeeding mothers’ (Mabaso 2023). My disciplinary transition from nutrition science to management studies emerged from observing how employed mothers – including healthcare professionals – lacked institutional breastfeeding support despite working in health systems. This contradiction shifted my focus from clinical outcomes to structural conditions of care, connecting me with my main supervisor whose work-family research aligned with these emerging questions.
The supervisory relationship became critical for epistemic and emotional navigation. My primary supervisor, an Indian South African organisational psychologist from a middle-upper-class background, brought complex subjectivity shaped by apartheid and post-apartheid experiences. Her scholarly trajectory reflects deliberate evolution towards decolonial and feminist praxis, particularly following #RhodesMustFall (Jaga 2020). As her first PhD student, our relationship carried mutual learning – she refined a more humanising approach, and I learned to articulate a scholarly voice beyond inherited silences. Our supervision operated through individual meetings, complemented by joint sessions with my co-supervisor, a white South African public health scientist and professor from the South African Medical Research Council who holds multiple affiliations with universities. With extensive publications and institutional networks, she represented established academic authority. Where my primary supervisor emphasised relational engagement, my co-supervisor offered traditional, outcomes-oriented mentoring focused on methodological rigour. These distinct approaches were not oppositional; together they reflected the relational possibilities of co-supervision as a humanising practice.
The relational dimensions of supervision extended beyond formal academic spaces. We communicated on WhatsApp (particularly with the primary supervisor), and I was invited to house-sit – gestures reflecting mutual trust and belonging I had not experienced in elite academic spaces. These informal encounters created authentic relationships within institutional hierarchies. At the same time, the joint meetings maintained academic focus while acknowledging different lived experiences and ways of knowing. My agency development occurred gradually as my supervisors challenged me to articulate theoretical positions rather than adopt established frameworks uncritically. My supervisors’ willingness to acknowledge their own uncertainties and learning processes created space for me to move from epistemic dependence to critical engagement. This transformation was fundamentally relational, occurring through what I now understand as mutual humanisation where both supervisor and student were changed through the encounter.
Both supervisors and I were navigating the same institutional constraints, albeit from different positions of power and privilege. My primary supervisor’s evolution towards decolonial praxis was itself strategic resistance to institutional norms she found constraining. The co-supervision model emerged partly from her recognition that she lacked certain institutional capital that my co-supervisor possessed. Thus, our ‘humanising’ relationship was mutually constructed through shared, though differently positioned, experiences of institutional navigation. My experience demonstrates strategic essentialism – the conscious deployment of marginalised identity categories to claim space and resources while working to transform the conditions that necessitate such strategies (Bell 2014). The supervisory relationship became transformative not through denial of power differentials, but through explicit engagement with how these could be leveraged for mutual empowerment rather than reproduction of hierarchy.
While black doctoral student representation has increased from 25% in 2000 to over 50% by 2018 (Department of Higher Education and Training [DHET] 2020), yet deep disparities persist, with black women remaining only 17% of active scientists nationally (Khuluvhe & Netshifhefhe 2023). This study emerges as both personal reflection and political intervention, asking what it means to belong, be supervised and be supervised within post-apartheid universities still structured by colonial residues.
Theoretical framework: Humanising praxis in doctoral supervision
My first encounter with the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s campus revealed the complex terrain I would navigate as a doctoral student. I walked through campus past where the Rhodes statue once stood. I then entered a department where the dean introduced herself by first name. This contrasted sharply with my previous academic experiences of rigid hierarchy. These moments confronted me with the institutional contradictions that would define my academic journey. The same university that felt alienating through its demographic profile and symbolic landscape also housed a department where I would experience meaningful academic support. These contradictory experiences illuminate how historically white institutions operate not as monolithic entities, but as contested spaces where humanising and dehumanising practices coexist in dynamic tension.
This institutional complexity, which I navigated through supervisory relationships that enabled my own transformation from inherited marginalisation to critical agency, demands theoretical frameworks that resist binary thinking. My experience of simultaneous gratitude and critique – feeling supported within my department while remaining critical of broader institutional patterns – led me to humanise praxis as a framework that could theoretically account for such contradictions. My own movement from ‘inherited silences’ to critical voice, facilitated through supervision that challenged me to articulate rather than adopt theoretical positions, exemplifies progression along what I now understand as Kronenberg’s (2018) humanisation continuum. Through my experience at UCT, I understand institutional whiteness as systemic patterns that privilege certain bodies and knowledge traditions while marginalising others, manifested in everyday encounters from casual conversations revealing class disparities to the symbolic landscape of colonial building names. Yet whiteness was not totalising. The same institution provided transformation initiatives following #RhodesMustFall and departmental cultures that actively challenged hierarchical academic traditions.
Humanising praxis, grounded in Ubuntu philosophy, frames humanisation as existing along a continuum – from harmful negations to salutogenic affirmations (Kronenberg 2018) – resonating with how my supervisors cultivated relational depth within an institution often structured by exclusion. My primary supervisor’s pedagogical practice, despite facing internal resistance for its decolonial orientation, made space for mutual recognition, clarity and agency. Through this, supervision became a site of relational transformation.
Ubuntu’s relational ontology – umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – suggests that contradiction and tension are not problems to be solved but conditions through which authentic relationships and growth emerge. My experience of simultaneously feeling grateful for departmental support while remaining critical of broader institutional whiteness reflects the reality of holding tensions between belonging and alienation, support and exclusion. Such complexity is familiar to those navigating South Africa’s persistent inequalities, where simple binaries of acceptance or total rejection prove inadequate.
Sonday’s (2016) concept of occupational consciousness further illuminates supervision as a professional role transgression. The primary supervisor’s deliberate recruitment of black South African postgraduate students in a context of persistent underrepresentation represented strategic resistance to institutional exclusion. Her advocacy for community-focused research methodologies constituted forms of role transgression that challenged conventional academic practices while working within existing structures – acts of strategic engagement rather than external defiance.
This theoretical framework positions doctoral supervision in post-apartheid South African higher education as a contested space where colonial legacies and transformative possibilities intersect. Rather than depicting historically white institutions as unchangeable or uniformly oppressive, it recognises them as sites where various actors engage in ongoing struggles over belonging, knowledge production and institutional culture. Through this lens, humanising supervision becomes not a salvation narrative but a practice of sustained engagement with institutional contradictions in service of more equitable scholarly relationships, acknowledging that transformation occurs through accumulated acts of humanising practice rather than dramatic institutional overhaul.
Research methods and design
This study employs autoethnography to examine the transformative potential of humanising practices in doctoral supervision. Autoethnography enables systematic analysis of personal experience to understand cultural phenomena (Adams, Ellis & Jones 2017; O’Hara 2018), making it valuable for examining power relations and institutional transformation in higher education. This approach aligns with the study’s theoretical orientation by centring marginalised voices while maintaining scholarly rigour (Xue, Van Kooten & Desmet 2025), reflecting humanising praxis’s emphasis on validating diverse ways of knowing. The methodological choice of autoethnography also reflects the same commitment to context-sensitive, decolonial knowledge production that informed my doctoral research approach through human-centred design thinking (Jaga et al. 2024) – recognising that transformative scholarship emerges through engagement with lived experience rather than detachment from it. Building on the overarching inquiry of what it means to belong and be supervised within post-apartheid universities still structured by colonial residues, this study examined how supervisory relationships constitute contested sites where humanising and dehumanising practices coexist.
Data collection and analysis
The primary data comprises 25 diary entries recorded between October 2019 and January 2023 during my doctoral journey. These entries were digitally recorded using iPhone notes, capturing real-time reflections on significant interactions, challenges, and moments of tension and negotiation in my supervisory relationship (Scott 2022). The study emerged organically through post-graduation reflection, approximately 1 year after completing my PhD. This temporal distance enabled analytic reflexivity, allowing critical examination of how personal experience intersects with broader institutional dynamics (Anderson 2006).
Thematic analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase framework, with Kronenberg’s (2018) humanisation-dehumanisation continuum serving as the primary interpretive lens. Rather than treating this continuum as a binary opposition, the analysis examined how movement, contradiction and coexistence characterise supervisory relationships embedded within institutional systems. Initial coding generated 42 preliminary codes refined through attention to complexity, fluidity and dialectical tensions, following Alvesson and Sköldberg’s (2018) reflexive methodology. The analytical framework organised findings into five interconnected themes examining ongoing negotiations along Kronenberg’s continuum while avoiding linear progression narratives, focusing on how supervisory relationships constitute sites of continuous tension between institutional reproduction and humanising resistance. Although I had two supervisors, this analysis centres mostly on my primary supervisor who served as my main mentor and with whom I developed the closest working relationship.
Throughout the analysis, I maintained awareness of emotional intensity when revisiting these experiences, employing self-care strategies including analytical breaks and supportive colleague discussions. This attention to emotional well-being reflects the study’s commitment to humanising practices as both the subject of investigation and methodological principle. Ethical considerations included obtaining verbal informed consent from my supervisors and acknowledging the ripple effect of autoethnographic research on connected others (Tullis 2021).
Ethical considerations
Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the University of Cape Town, Faculty of Commerce School of Management Studies (Reference no: REC 2019/008/068).
Results
The analysis revealed five interconnected themes that demonstrate the complex, simultaneous nature of humanising and dehumanising processes within supervisory relationships, challenging linear progression narratives. The themes are: (1) Spatial and embodied negotiations in contested terrain; (2) Epistemic positioning and the development of critical consciousness; (3) Authentic mentorship within institutional fragmentation; (4) Creating safe spaces within unsafe institutions; and (5) Critical engagement and strategic agency within institutional constraints.
Spatial and embodied negotiations in contested terrain
My experience as a black South African scholar at UCT revealed how space operates as a contested terrain rather than a uniformly alienating environment. The emotional intensity of early campus encounters centred on the institution’s colonial foundations – walking past the empty plinth where Rhodes’ statue stood before #RhodesMustFall, feeling ‘I was a “black k#@r” who was an intruder’ navigating spaces that communicated ‘it’s not my place’ (Diary entry number 01, 28 October 2019, p. 21). Yet this alienation coexisted with experiences of genuine belonging within the same institutional space. For example, I found refuge at the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa, where speakers regularly reflected on marginalised experiences, and in my welcoming department. This spatial complexity extended beyond the campus to Cape Town itself, where I felt positioned in ‘servitude: In Cape Town I became positioned … a slave, a servant, a dog begging for crumbles from the dining table of the white king’ (Diary entry number 01, 28 October 2019, p. 21). These contradictory spatial experiences illuminated contested spaces as simultaneously excluding and including, alienating and embracing, depending on location, people present and historical moment. The university became a microcosm of ongoing negotiations characterising post-apartheid existence, revealing tensions we constantly navigate rather than resolve. These encounters exemplify what Pillay (2023) terms ‘spatial trauma’, where environments reproduce historical violence yet contain possibilities for transformation. Rather than experiencing uniform exclusion, I learned to read institutional spaces as complex terrains where colonial legacies and decolonial possibilities coexist, requiring strategic navigation. This ongoing tension became central to understanding my doctoral journey – not as a movement from exclusion to inclusion, but as an ongoing negotiation of spaces that simultaneously constrain and enable different forms of agency.
Epistemic positioning and the development of critical consciousness
My epistemic positioning as a black South African woman created complex tensions between academic ‘objectivity’ and lived experience that evolved from alienation towards strategic integration. Initially, I struggled:
[A]s a black woman who is at the bottom of the barrel [in society] … to try to remain objective … when the things I read as history continue to be my reality (Diary entry number 19, 13 February 2022, p. 5).
This tension became particularly acute during my PhD research on workplace breastfeeding support, where I analysed data from participants working in quintile one school – barely resourced spaces served by black professionals who were also navigating generational poverty (Mabaso et al. 2023). Rather than maintaining an artificial separation between academic analysis and experiential knowledge, I discovered that my background as a nutritionist and my lived experience of navigating working-class realities became central analytical tools. I could relate to and empathise with working mothers’ needs precisely because I shared similar systemic challenges. This positioned experience became what enabled a nuanced understanding of how workplace conditions intersect with structural inequalities.
Critical consciousness emerged through this epistemic tension rather than as a resolution to it. My primary supervisor modelled engagement with questions of positionality while navigating elite spaces. Sharing her experience as a fellow at Harvard, she noted that ‘their problems are far from the problems we have and are dealing with in our context’ (Diary entry number 03, 14 April 2020, p. 17). This helped me develop analytical tools to understand oppression while strategically engaging systems that demand compliance for survival. As ‘a black woman’ who is ‘constantly asked to be everything but herself’ (Diary entry number 13, 13 October 2021, p. 10), I learned to maintain an authentic voice while strategically engaging institutional expectations. Over time, I learned to appreciate bringing all parts of myself to the doctoral process rather than fragmenting my academic and personal identity. My supervisors consistently validated this experiential knowledge while providing tools to theorise it systematically – this autoethnography being a practical example of that process. My ‘bottom of the barrel’ positioning, rather than being purely constraining, cultivated heightened sensitivity to power dynamics and systems navigation that became analytical strength. The epistemic challenge thus evolved from fragmentation towards strategic integration – learning to position experiential knowledge as a scholarly resource rather than an academic liability, enabling me to read institutional and research contexts with a nuanced awareness of how structural inequalities shape experience.
Authentic mentorship within institutional fragmentation
The foundation of transformative supervision emerged strongest through my primary supervisor’s authenticity – her strategic integration of personal and professional identities that challenged academic norms requiring fragmentation. She consistently introduced herself as ‘daughter, mother, wife, sister, and academic’, foregrounding multiple roles as constituting her whole personhood. This approach originated from her positioning as a decolonial-feminist scholar whose own PhD research on Hindu women’s work–family conflict was intimately connected to her lived experience (Jaga & Bagraim 2017), evolving through engagement with #RhodesMustFall towards a scholarship that embodies rather than merely studies transformation. What I experienced as authenticity represented her pushback against academia’s demands for assimilation and conformity – particularly the expectation that black women divorce parts of themselves to become acceptable in predominantly white, masculine spaces. Rather than performing narrowly defined academic personae, she presented what I found to be a refreshing and colourful personhood rarely seen in these institutional contexts. Her willingness to share vulnerabilities, including acknowledging intimidation in elite spaces like her Harvard fellowship where she would ‘just sit there, and not say anything’ (Diary entry number 03, 14 April 2020, p. 17), created exemplary modelling of academic honesty that countered typical performances of expertise and certainty. This authenticity manifested through specific supervisory practices that fostered wholeness. During my early days struggling with Cape Town’s public transport, I arrived late to a provincial government meeting feeling mortified. Rather than addressing my lateness critically, she immediately empathised and checked if I was okay before proceeding – prioritising my wellbeing over professional protocol. Our supervision meetings consistently began with personal check-ins where each of us including my co-supervisor would share burning personal issues before addressing academic business. This supervision style created new tensions alongside its humanising effects. While her approach modelled the integration of personal and academic identities, I still needed to navigate institutional spaces that expected traditional academic performance. Learning to maintain authenticity while strategically engaging institutional demands required ongoing negotiation – demonstrating that humanising practices create complex challenges rather than simple solutions.
By modelling the integration of personal and academic identities rather than requiring separation, my supervisors created conditions for me to claim similar wholeness. This approach challenged traditional academic hierarchies through engaged pedagogy – teaching that recognises the wholeness of both teacher and student (hooks 1994). The power dynamics in our supervisory relationship were constituted differently than typical academic hierarchies as the primary supervisor positioned herself as both institutional representative and institutional critic, embodying resistance to dehumanising structures while strategically navigating them. My choice to model her approach was active rather than passive imitation – I consciously adopted her strategies for maintaining authenticity while engaging academic demands, learning to present multiple aspects of my identity rather than performing academic conformity. This modelling represented a movement towards humanisation through practices that affirmed dignity and wholeness within institutional contexts otherwise structured by fragmentation.
Creating safe spaces within unsafe institutions
My supervisor cultivated a space where I could process both academic challenges and personal traumas ‘without additional strain from [her]’ (Diary entry number 08, 10 July 2021, p. 13). Perhaps most transformative was her unconditional positive regard that preceded academic validation: ‘assuming the best of me even when I hadn’t proved myself’ (Diary entry number 08, 10 July 2021, p. 13). This directly countered my internalised expectation that ‘I must prove my worth to her before she can treat me with regard’ (Diary entry number 08, 10 July 2021, p. 13) – a belief that, while particularly acute for students navigating the constructed positioning of ‘feeling black and poor’ within predominantly white institutions, extends beyond racialised experiences to characterise many supervisory relationships where students feel they must earn basic dignity through performance.
The supervisory style created room for me to express that I could not meet deadlines because of ‘personal things going on’ without requiring detailed explanations or judgement. I did not have to fake wellness to appease her, something common in supervisory relationships that prioritise work completion over acknowledging students’ wholeness. This became critical during my second year when I experienced multiple forms of violence – being mugged during a morning run and sexually assaulted by another student I had met at a public lecture. While I chose not to inform my supervisors directly about the sexual assault (I did not want to discuss it within our supervisory relationship), the supervisory approach meant that I could still access support without disclosure, expressing struggles without having to perform academic normalcy. This exemplifies trauma-informed mentorship that recognises how academic experiences intersect with histories of marginalisation and personal challenges (Grossman, Wanjiku & Nguku 2024).
The cumulative stress of navigating institutional marginalisation manifested in embodied symptoms that extended beyond typical doctoral challenges. Burnout culminated in my final year: ‘against my desire to do any work, I would sit at my desk and not even be able to read … The thought of speaking to anyone shattered me’ (Diary entry number 17, 07 January 2022, p. 7). As a first-generation PhD student, this exhaustion was compounded by a deep sense of isolation – carrying an experience few around me could relate to, while also feeling torn between academic demands and the unmet needs of the family who still relied on me as ‘sister, aunt, daughter’ (Diary entry number 17, 07 January 2022, p. 7). The weight of being the first also meant I had no familial roadmap or buffer, making the emotional cost of burnout even more profound. Yet this safe space existed within broader institutional contexts that remained fundamentally unsafe. While the supervisory relationship provided refuge, I continued to navigate campus spaces where sexual assault occurred, administrative systems offering limited trauma support and academic pressures demanding productivity regardless of personal circumstances. The safety was thus partial and contingent rather than comprehensive – a micro-site of care within persistently harmful institutional structures. This tension reveals how interpersonal humanising practices provide essential support while operating within – rather than transforming – oppressive institutional dynamics. The creation of a safe space operated as a temporary refuge rather than a permanent transformation demonstrates that care can flourish even within institutions that continue to position marginalised students as outsiders required to prove legitimacy.
Critical engagement and strategic agency within institutional constraints
The supervisory relationship balanced rigorous academic standards with human-centred support, demonstrating that critique could be developmental without dehumanising. My experience of academic feedback had been shaped by institutional contexts where critique often functioned as a gatekeeping mechanism that questions students’ fundamental legitimacy rather than supporting intellectual development (Jiang & Wang 2023). However, my supervisors delivered critique with ‘honour, care and stretching (Diary entry number 10, 24 June 2021, p. 12)’ in ways that preserved my dignity while maintaining scholarly rigour. I expressed appreciation for this approach: ‘Thank you for the well-considered critique – I appreciate that I’ve never read an email and felt attacked as a person’ (Diary entry number 10, 24 June 2021, p. 12). This approach emerged from my supervisor’s understanding that critique becomes dehumanising when it targets personhood rather than ideas, particularly for students from marginalised backgrounds who navigate institutional spaces where their presence is already questioned. By framing feedback as an invitation to deeper thinking rather than the judgement of inadequacy, they demonstrated that academic rigour need not sacrifice human dignity.
Strategic exposure to global academic networks facilitated agency development while revealing persistent institutional hierarchies. My supervisors acted as a bridge between me and established scholars in my research area whom I perceived as ‘very far off my reach’, functioning as ‘a soft middle woman – holding my hand as I make the bold moves contributing to developing my own voice and confidence’ (Diary entry number 04, 11 September 2020, p. 17). This perceived distance could have emerged from my rural schooling background where academic ‘experts’ were presented as distant authorities, reinforced by the working-class positioning that constructed academic elites as fundamentally different from ‘people like me’. The sense of being ‘far off reach’ reflected how my educational biography had positioned international scholars as geographically and culturally remote figures rather than accessible colleagues, creating psychological barriers that extended beyond practical considerations of access. When the supervisors challenged me beyond my comfort zone – despite my ‘giving her all sorts of excuses trying to get out of presenting’ (Diary entry number 07, 08 July 2021, p. 13) – they created scaffolded opportunities that built confidence while requiring engagement with spaces that remained fundamentally unchanged. Reflecting on a developmental international conference, I noted:
[M]y confidence cup has improved a bit realising that it’s a level playing field … the conference opened me up to the wider research culture that writing is a process – it was encouraging to read work from different academics and participate in feedback sessions and witness the ‘writing process’ of others (Diary entry number 06, 08 July 2021, p. 14).
Witnessing diverse academics struggle with similar writing challenges countered my internalised belief that my difficulties reflected personal inadequacy rather than a normal scholarly process. This exposure was particularly valuable because it revealed that academic struggle transcends individual positioning – that even established scholars grapple with uncertainty, revision and intellectual development. Yet this recognition occurred within academic networks that continued to reflect global inequities, where scholars from the Global South remained marginally represented despite shared writing struggles.
Through positioning me as both recipient and provider of academic feedback within these networks, my supervisors facilitated movement from the periphery towards meaningful participation while operating within academic communities that continued to privilege certain voices over others. By creating conditions for reciprocal intellectual engagement that built on my strengths while maintaining developmental challenges, the supervisors demonstrated that empowerment emerges through critical engagement that affirms rather than diminishes human dignity. This empowerment however required continuous strategic positioning within institutions that continued to reward conformity over authenticity, demonstrating how transformative supervision creates opportunities for tactical resistance rather than systemic transformation.
Discussion
This autoethnographic study examined how humanising praxis operates within doctoral supervision in post-apartheid South African higher education. Through the lens of Ubuntu philosophy and Kronenberg’s humanisation–dehumanisation continuum, the findings reveal how supervisory relationships constitute contested spaces where colonial legacies and transformative possibilities intersect through ongoing relational engagement. Rather than depicting linear transformation, the study illuminates how humanising supervision enables the navigation of institutional contradictions through the complex reality of holding tensions that Ubuntu’s relational ontology makes possible.
The findings extend Ubuntu philosophy’s application beyond traditional communal contexts to modern institutional settings characterised by structural inequalities. My simultaneous experience of spatial exclusion and belonging within UCT exemplifies Ubuntu’s core insight where authentic relationships emerge through rather than despite contradiction and tension (Metz 2007). This challenges institutional change models that seek resolution of contradictions rather than strategic engagement with them. The supervisory relationships enacted Ubuntu’s foundational recognition of human interconnectedness (Ramose 2002) while embedded within institutional frameworks perpetuating colonial exclusions. Movement along Kronenberg’s (2018) humanisation–dehumanisation continuum occurred through accumulated interpersonal practices – creating safe spaces for trauma processing, facilitating critical academic engagement and modelling ethical reflexivity – rather than dramatic institutional transformation. This movement was neither linear nor permanent but required ongoing relational commitment (hooks 1994). The coexistence of psychological burden alongside developing academic agency illustrates how humanisation and dehumanisation processes operate simultaneously rather than sequentially. This complexity resonates with Cornell and Van Marle’s (2015) argument that Ubuntu offers a relational ethic for navigating enduring structural inequalities rather than resolving them, demonstrating how transformative supervision creates opportunities within rather than the transcendence of constraining structures.
The findings reveal how humanising supervision emerges through the complex interplay of institutional positioning, personal biography and sustained ethical commitment to relational transformation. My supervisors’ strategic role transgression – integrating personal and professional identities, sharing vulnerabilities, creating trauma-informed support – exemplified what Sonday (2016) terms occupational consciousness that emerged from their specific locations as feminist scholars working within a historically white university while also challenging its exclusionary practices (Sonday, Ramugondo & Kathard 2019). This extends supervision literature by demonstrating specific mechanisms through which professional transgression humanises academic hierarchies when coupled with critical reflexivity about one’s positioning (Manathunga 2007). Their positioning as both institutional insiders and critics enacted necessary complexity in supervision, strategically using credibility to challenge exclusionary practices while remaining accountable to the limitations of their perspectives (Grant & Manathunga 2011). Their capacity for humanising practice was enabled by, rather than despite, complex positioning within academic hierarchies. However, this study’s scope limits broader claims about supervision across different institutional locations. What emerges is that humanising supervision requires sustained engagement with one’s positioned knowledge and institutional power, though specific forms this engagement takes will vary across different supervisory contexts (McKinley et al. 2011).
The study contributes to postcolonial supervision literature by revealing doctoral relationships as micro-sites of humanising praxis within broader institutional patterns that continue reproducing colonial hierarchies (Fataar 2018). Rather than depicting institutions as uniformly oppressive or completely transformable, the findings illuminate universities as contested terrain where various actors engage in continuous negotiation over belonging and knowledge production. This builds on Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2019) analysis of South African higher education’s ongoing coloniality by demonstrating how accumulated acts of humanising supervision contribute to institutional transformation without requiring a dramatic structural overhaul. The supervisory relationships constituted strategic intervention within larger struggles over academic culture while acknowledging institutional constraints. The experience of holding tensions that emerged – feeling simultaneously grateful for departmental support while maintaining criticism of broader institutional whiteness – reflects Ubuntu’s recognition of necessary relational complexity (Murove 2009). This provides realistic pathways for institutional engagement within postcolonial contexts, showing how meaningful change emerges through sustained relational commitment rather than revolutionary transformation. The study reveals how humanising supervision operates as tactical resistance (Proudfoot 2025) within unchanged institutional structures, creating conditions for dignified academic development while acknowledging the partial and contingent nature of such transformation. This offers practical guidance for supervision within higher education contexts where colonial legacies persist alongside emerging transformative possibilities.
Implications for supervision in postcolonial higher education
The study offers practical guidance for supervision within historically white institutions undergoing decolonial pressure. Rather than requiring complete institutional transformation, the findings suggest that strategic supervisory practices can create meaningful conditions for student agency development within existing constraints. Supervisors can model critical engagement with institutional hierarchies, create trauma-informed support systems and facilitate networks while operating within systems that reproduce colonial patterns. The emphasis on navigating complexity and holding tensions offers realistic approaches that acknowledge institutional limitations while enabling tactical resistance. However, the study reveals the boundaries of interpersonal interventions in addressing structural inequalities. While humanising supervision created significant developmental opportunities, it operated within institutional structures that continued reproducing colonial hierarchies, highlighting the need for multi-level change approaches combining interpersonal practices with broader structural interventions.
Methodological contribution and future research directions
This autoethnographic study generates deep insight into humanising supervision as a bounded system within postcolonial higher education contexts. Rather than seeking generalisability, the study seeks to provoke theoretical thinking about Ubuntu philosophy’s application to institutional settings and activate a generative understanding of how humanising praxis operates within colonial structures. The study’s theoretical contributions open critical questions for future research. How do different configurations of supervisory relationships enact Ubuntu principles within historically white institutions? What forms of humanising praxis emerge across various disciplinary and institutional contexts? How do supervisory relationships that reproduce rather than resist marginalisation illuminate the boundaries of transformative practice? These questions emerge from the study’s engagement with supervisory pedagogy as a phenomenon rather than from methodological limitations. The focus on successful navigation provides theoretical insight into possibilities for strategic agency development while acknowledging that other experiences may reveal different dynamics. Future research might explore longitudinal dimensions of how transformative supervision capabilities develop over time, and institutional ethnographies examining structural modifications that support rather than burden individual relationships.
Conclusion
This autoethnographic study reveals how humanising supervision within post-apartheid South African higher education operates through sustained relational engagement rather than linear transformation. Through Ubuntu’s relational ontology, supervisory relationships enable strategic navigation of institutional contradictions by embracing complexity and rejecting false choices between acceptance and resistance. The findings demonstrate how accumulated relational practices – trauma-informed support, strategic networking and critical consciousness modelling – constitute humanising praxis within rather than external to colonial structures. This research suggests that meaningful engagement with decolonial imperatives requires recognising supervision as tactical resistance that contributes to broader transformation efforts.
Acknowledgements
The author extends her deepest gratitude to her PhD supervisors, Professor Ameeta Jaga (School of Management Studies, University of Cape Town) and Professor Tanya Doherty (Health Systems Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council, Cape Town) for their unwavering support throughout her doctoral journey. She also acknowledges the leadership within the School of Management Studies at the University of Cape Town for the institutional support provided during her PhD studies. While their contribution was important, it did not meet the criteria for authorship. This work honours all students from historically marginalised backgrounds who continue to transform higher education through their presence and persistence.
Competing interests
The author declares that no financial or personal relationships inappropriately influenced the writing of this article.
Author’s contributions
B.P.M. is the sole author of this research article.
Funding information
The author received doctoral scholarship support from the University of Cape Town’s School of Management Studies. This publication received no specific research grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data availability
The data supporting this autoethnographic study consist of personal diary entries. Because of the personal and confidential nature of these data, it is not publicly available. Data may be made available upon reasonable request and with appropriate ethical considerations from the corresponding author, B.P.M.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The author are responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.
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Footnote
1. Humanisation refers to supervisory practices that affirm students’ humanity, recognise their full personhood, and engage with their social and cultural realities in meaningful and respectful ways. Conversely, dehumanisation occurs when supervision treats students as disembodied producers of knowledge – ignoring their lived experiences, marginalising their identities or reducing them to mere academic outputs (Kronenberg 2018).
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