There is a rather widely held perception that doctoral students begin their formal studies in a foundational discipline and then continue in it throughout their academic careers. It would then follow that their doctoral supervisors would share their supervisees’ home discipline. Supervisor-supervisee pairs would research and teach in the same discipline, would share an interest in specialized topic area, and perhaps even engage in a preferred methodological approach. However, evidence from applied research fields, including educational research, suggests this pattern may not consistently be the case, with the effect of traditional disciplinary blurring leading to unanticipated doctoral research and supervisory challenges. An extended literature review was conducted, after which a research design was developed to explore the central question, “How can supervisors support their postgraduate students to work through threshold crossings if they come from different foundational disciplines, even if they are working within a clearly delimited field of study?”
This paper reports findings from a resultant qualitative, small scale study of fourteen applied research doctoral supervisors from ten universities in five countries. Using a grounded theory-informed strategy, interview transcripts were individually coded and then discussed between both researchers to develop and agree upon shared themes. A series of disciplinary challenges, opportunities, and questions surfaced. Questions around disciplinarity were found to be especially pronounced when influenced by a need for methodological pluralism to investigate complex, contextualised problems, which most often occurred when divergent academic backgrounds introduced tensions between supervisors and supervisees. This paper discusses a broad set of challenges, opportunities, and questions around transdiciplinary integration and problematises threshold concepts and crossings in applied doctoral studies.
