The Supervisory Assemblage A Singular Doctoral Experience

In this unique book, Liz Done undertakes an affective thought-provoking nomadic inquiry into the doctoral process in which she engages with the writings of Deleuze, Cixous, Nietzsche, Foucault and many others. The paradox of learning, as thoroughly relational but simultaneously implying the radical specificity of every learner's experience, is unpacked in a text that is careful to explain the ideas and theories that are mobilised. As a pedagogic intervention, the book seeks to raise questions, not answer them, but ultimately offers a very powerful statement about the value of education as learning and its capacity to transform a life. Academic production is revealed as a situated, embedded, relational, and complex process. The book's rhizomatic threads include: transgressing linear neopositivist models, doing something different with theory, the importance of free experimentation, and memory as both mobility and freedom. Braidotti's nomadic subjectivity and Gannon's refusal to be pinned down in a bid for intellectual purity were also mobilised in the writing of this text. It performs the inclusive potential of Deleuzian and feminist poststructuralist thought, insisting on a scholarship that is about open inquiry, (ad)venture, and learning as multiplicity. It is untimely, as Deleuze might say, in its contemporary relevance.