Mentoring through advice: Shaping rhetorical agency in doctoral supervision

Abstract

Mentoring in doctoral supervision dynamically shapes students' research orientations, practices and positioning on an ongoing basis. Existing research has examined the role of mentoring in promoting such development. Insufficient attention, however, has been paid to how mentoring, enacted through supervisory advice, mediates doctoral writers' rhetorical agency and epistemic independence. Drawing on thematic and intertextual analyses of a doctoral student's supervision (emails, written comments, textual revisions), this study explores how mentoring fosters dialogicality and discursive knowledge negotiation around her doctoral thesis. Findings reveal email communication as a crucial site that helps the doctoral writer configure her disciplinary positioning and express the legitimacy of her work. Mentoring advice orients her towards mediated rhetorical agency – a mechanism promoting her effective meaning making and evolving epistemic independence. This agency reflects a dynamic capacity to act, mobilizing rhetorical and epistemological resources under supervisory guidance and coordinating them to enhance the visibility of her scholarly voice in doctoral writing.