In July of this year I went to a conference in South Africa, the Higher Education Close-Up conference (one of my favourites because it is small and very collegial and constructive). The theme of the conference was ‘Trust’, which the conference website contexualised thus:

“Trust is a necessary ingredient for collaboration and cooperation, and it is thus a cornerstone of higher education. Students trust institutions to provide a quality education that enables access to the knowledge and practices that they will take into the world. Academics trust students to engage in their studies with intellectual curiosity and academic integrity. Researchers trust each other to uphold rigorous inquiry standards and undertake knowledge creation and dissemination in ethical ways. The public trusts universities to serve society. … It cannot be taken for granted, it needs to be cultivated through open communication and the embracing of diversity. In a trustworthy ecosystem, staff and students thrive, knowledge flourishes, and society benefits” (emphasis added).

I picked up on the point on (not) taking trust for granted, and used that to think about the practices of trust and trustworthiness in doctoral supervision. In this post, I want to tease out some of the implications of the exhortation many doctoral researchers hear at some point or another in their studies to ‘trust the process’. I have used that phrase with my students, and my own supervisor used it with me; I have written about this idea on this blog. But working on this paper, and reflecting closely on what ‘the process’ is that we ask students to trust and what that trusting implies, has made me rethink some of my earlier ideas about using this phrase very carefully in future.

As a starting point, it is useful to understand trust as one side of a coin, the other side of which is trustworthiness. Bob Hudson defines trust as “a device for coping with the freedom of others to disappoint our expectations”. In essence, theorists who conceptualise trust argue that, if we knew everything about everyone and about the world around us and had the foresight to know what was coming at us, we would not need to trust. Trust therefore implies a willingness to be vulnerable, to be disappointed, but also a faith that we’ll be okay. When we choose to trust, we choose to believe it will work out, usually because we’ve trusted in the past in similar circumstances and been okay, or because the person or process we are trusting has proven themselves worthy of our faith. When we choose not to trust, it is likely because we have been let down in the past, or because the person or process is unknown to us and we just can’t take the risk that it will all be okay. Trust can be “automatically” given (in the sense that we trust people in factories not to poison our food, or pilots not to crash the planes we fly in and so on): we need this kind of basic trust to live our lives and leave the house. But other, more complex forms of trust – such as the trust we place in people we choose to be in a relationship with, personal or professional – need to be earned, and carefully honoured and sustained. Trust can be broken, and it can be rebuilt, too.

This leads us to trustworthiness, as in I will trust you if and when you show me you are trustworthy. Karen Jones argues that trustworthiness requires “active engagement with dependency”, meaning that if we know someone trusts us (or wants to trust us), and we want to be worthy of that trust, we will be motivated to behave in a way that merits being counted on. This means we are likely to be conscious of and reflect on what we are doing, or not doing, to merit being counted on, especially by someone who may bear a greater risk if things don’t work out well. This last bit is worth digging into a bit more in relation to doctoral supervision relationships: who carries the greater risk – the supervisor(s), or the candidate? How is that calculated? I think recognising that relational exchanges of trust and trustworthiness are complex and intersectional, and that vulnerability can take different forms – some of which may not immediately be visible – is important. Universities are diverse places – supervisor and student groups are full of diversity: linguistic, gender, ‘race’, socioeconomic status (class), nationality, sexuality, disability, prior learning experiences, culture, ethnicity, and more. It stands to reason, then, that we have to be careful and critical when we think about what it means to ask doctoral students to trust their supervisors, and what it may mean for supervisors to trust their students, and what trustworthiness on both sides may entail.

In relation to my own supervision experience, I think about the things about my students that I know or feel safe to assume based on that knowledge, and the things I don’t, or perhaps, can’t know, and the assumptions I have to be critical of or get rid of altogether. For example, if I know a student has had a winding, perhaps fractured, academic path to the doctorate, how do I ask them to trust a research process that most likely is unclear or confusing to them, and not necessarily explained thoroughly because of various assumptions about their knowledge or ability? Many students whose route to the doctorate has been winding, rather than straight from school to undergrad to postgrad, find they are at sea and asked to trust a process they don’t feel they can have faith in. At least not yet. There are so many examples we can think of that intersect race and gender, gender, sexuality and culture, language and nationality, disability, race and gender, and on and on. Common to all of them are vulnerability and risk: what kinds of vulnerabilities are we tacitly asking for, who is carrying the risk, and, importantly, (how) are we adjusting or changing existing structures and systems to support students and supervisors who are being made vulnerable, and carrying the risk in these relationships?

We have to see supervision practice as more than an administrative process focused on writing a thesis. Supervision practice is relational, intersectional, and layered. It is – or at least should be – focused on developing a researcher who can write a thesis, but can ultimately do so much more than that. In the context of trust and trustworthiness, this means being conscious of power and of the ‘hidden curriculum’* that forms a large part of the process we ask students (and supervisors) to trust. University structures and policies place supervisors in positions of relative power: supervisors give feedback that shapes students’ writing and knowledge-making, and they are thus the arbiters of what is ‘good’ or ‘not there yet’ about students’ writing and thinking. Supervisors sign off on students’ progress (and decide what counts as appropriate progress), and so on. This means students have to trust that supervisors are on their side, and doing their work ethically and with care. Research shows us, though, that not all students feel this expectation is met and that they have the most to lose if things go wrong. Further, there are many things successful doctoral students don’t yet know, cannot yet do, dispositions they are still taking on, most of which they are assumed to know or be able to learn without overt guidance or explanation. Nor being able to fully see or access the ‘hidden curriculum’ of doctoral study creates a profound sense of uncertainty, and distrust, for many students, especially those who are not what Nirmal Puwar has called “the somatic norm” within universities.

To return to the prompt for the larger paper, then, we cannot take trust for granted. We cannot assume everyone who engages in a doctoral research project and its associated processes can, or should, automatically trust them. We cannot demand that students automatically trust their supervisors because of the position they hold, or even that supervisors should automatically trust their students. I think we need a more careful approach from all sides to building and sustaining trust, which requires us to make visible what is hidden – to explain what different disciplines and fields do to create and debate knowledge, how, why, and when; to make visible our expectations of students and be open to the possibility that some of these expectations may be underpinned by problematic and exclusionary assumptions or beliefs about what ‘good’ looks like, research and researchers alike. And to be willing to make changes, to do better once we know better.

Making and protecting space, and time, for conscious, critical and vulnerable conversations within our universities about what research is and could be, who and what researchers are and could be, and the role that research supervision plays in nurturing and guiding emerging research/ers is a good place to start. Through these, we can work to create and sustain research communities and environments that are more consciously inclusive of the researchers, and research, within them, and that can, in turn, be trusted and trustworthy.

* Eliot et al (2020) define the hidden curriculum as “all unofficial mechanisms of learning that take place within and outwith academia … [that] support, empower and enable doctoral researchers”.