Monday 12 October, 1-2PM via Zoom. Please contact Dinesh Wadiwel for Zoom information

Abstract

When the pandemic hit, doctoral supervision moved online around the globe. Virtual Zoom or Skype meetings suddenly replaced in person gatherings and challenged the traditional notion of doctoral education as a local apprenticeship. But is there really a benefit of meeting in person if technological advances in videoconferencing technology made it possible to maintain and even build close relationships at a distance? What are the differences between real and virtual meetings if people can hear, see, spontaneously respond to each other and even share their epistemic objects in quasi-natural multimodal interactions?

In this seminar, Marc explores potential impacts of videoconferencing technology on advisor-candidate relationships and interactions. He critically reviews previous research on remote PhD supervision drawing on in-depth analyses of recorded Zoom meetings in which advisors and candidates discuss doctoral research. The data is part of his larger comparative project that compares doctoral research and supervision practices in the social sciences and physics within the German chair, Australian lecturer and US graduate school system.

About the speaker

Marc Torka is a sociologist of science, higher education and the professions. His research aims to understand how institutional, technological and knowledge change may or may not impact on professional and academic work. He is currently Honorary Associate at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney as well as CI of the project “International Comparison of Doctoral Training Practices” funded by the German Research Foundation. Before Marc moved to Australia in 2015, he was researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (2007-2012), the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (2013-2016) and lecturer at Berlin Humboldt-University. His recent work on doctoral education and academic habitus formation has been published in Minerva (2018, 2019), Internationalisation in Higher Education (2019) and Australian Universities’ Review (2020). He is currently working on a book on academic socialisation worldwide.