Respect, Critique, and Academic Voice: Pakistani Postgraduate Students’ Negotiation of Authority in Dissertation Writing

Abstract

The problem of development of academic voice is one of the significant and difficult issues of postgraduate dissertation writing, especially in the context of academic culture which is hierarchical. The current study examines the negotiation of academic voice by Pakistani post-graduate dissertation writers in the context of supervisor and examiner's feedback while writing their dissertations. The exploration draws upon the theory of Etienne Wenger (1998) Communities of Practice and Mikhail Bakhtin dialogism (1981), and focuses on the role of feedback as a process of disciplinary socialization, participation in scholarship, and construction of identity. Nine Pakistani postgraduate students were interviewed using open-ended questions on their experiences of feedback, critique and academic writing. The results indicated that the participants' tendency to write descriptively and eventually to analyze and interpret their experiences was to be expected, as they continued to write in a reflexive style guided by their supervisors, using Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke (2006) reflexive thematic analysis. The study also revealed that participants' ideas of respect for authority sometimes conflicted with their desire to evaluate existing scholars. Moreover, feedback was demonstrated to have developmental and emotional impact on scholarly identity and confidence. The study has implications for other studies focusing on academic voice, feedback practices, and postgraduate writing in multilingual and culturally located settings of post graduate education (Bakhtin, 1981; Wenger, 1998).

Keywords: Academic voice, postgraduate dissertation writing, Communities of Practice, thematic analysis