On supervisor and doctoral student – Positioning, relations and space-in-between

How can the relationship between a supervisor and a doctoral student be described and understood? What is happening in a relationship is not predetermined in any linear causal line. Action of type B is not causal caused by action type A. Instead the explanation of the pattern of succession between two persons and social acts can be described and understood as dynamic relations in constant motion and emergent. Identity, power, emotion, feelings and institutionalised conceptions of behaviour together with structural conditions (formal aspects) surrounds or comprise relations. In each meeting between people is positioning of oneself and the other always present. To get empirical material I interviewed for two hours a researchers about her experience of her time as doctoral student. The situation is a research team which included doctoral student and supervisor in medical research. A narrative approach was my starting point. Such a means in brief to get stories about events in relationships to people and context. The presentation of the empirical material is also in the narrative form to be "fair" to practice. The outcome of the story is that the relationship between supervisor and student is a complex relationship that contains a number of factors that cannot be attributed to linear causality.