Working together beyond the PhD

Most work on supervisors’ and doctoral students’ relationships focuses on the PhD journey, which (ideally) builds sound working interactions, good research practices, and a thesis which makes a valuable contribution to knowledge. Working intellectual interactions between supervisors and postgraduates can develop in both positive and negative ways during the supervisory relationship term, and for those seeking academic careers, ongoing work with a supervisor can be a useful first step in entering the research and writing conversations in which the supervisor might already have a role. Not all graduates wish to pursue working with, writing and publishing with their supervisor, perhaps because they do not seek an ongoing academic relationship and perhaps because they have not undertaken the PhD in the first place intending to become an academic themselves. However, there are some problematic relations between students and supervisors, during and after graduation, and some issues regarding intellectual property. Autoethnographic and other narrative interviewing with doctoral graduates (including the researchers) reveals insights that boundaries of the PhD process are often artificially limited, and that working intellectual interactions between supervisors and graduate doctors continue in various ways, for better or for worse post-graduation. Some positive co-working produces co-written, co-owned publications and work on funded or unfunded projects, while the less positive examples could be described as less than benign neglect (Gurr, 2001), and in worst case scenarios, intellectual property theft.