Role
I am a senior lecturer in the Doctoral School with a focus on doctoral education and development. This includes working with doctoral researchers and supervisors. My role is centred on creating, managing, and co-delivering a university-wide programme of workshops, short courses, and events for PGR focused on different aspects of the doctoral life-cycle, from proposal development and project conceptualisation, through researching and writing the dissertation, to submission, defense and sharing the research with relevant readers and audiences. I coordinate and deliver a related programme for supervisors aligned with the UKCGE's Good Supervisory Practice Framework and responsive to the needs of NTU's doctoral candidates and supervisors. I am a member of the Collaboratory Research Hub, a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University and an active doctoral supervisor and examiner. I am also an active researcher and scholar, and my scholarship focuses on paths to enabling greater social justice and equity in higher education, especially within doctoral and postdoctoral education.
Career overview
I am a higher education studies scholar, but my early degrees were in Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies. Since completing my PhD in 2014 at Rhodes University in South Africa, I have been working as an academic developer, largely with postgraduate and early career scholars on their development as writers, lecturers, and supervisors. Prior to this, I was the coordinator of the UWC Writing Centre at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, where my work and research focused on undergraduate student writing development across the curriculum, as well as pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment development work with lecturers. Between 2017 and 2021, I worked on a range of projects as a higher education consultant, from mentoring teams of lecturers through extensive curriculum review projects and designing and teaching short courses for early career and postgraduate writers to creating online materials for research students and supervisors and mentoring emerging supervisors in formal academic development courses.
I work across many different disciplines, with a range of students, lecturers and projects. This experience and insight enables me to be agile in my work, able to listen to and appreciate different insights and perspectives and bring these together to create interdisciplinary connections and meanings. My research, and the theoretical lenses I have used to date, offer me, as a practitioner, crucial insights into how different forms of knowledge are created, debated, and shared, primarily through written texts which I can then bring to bear on the teaching and professional development work I do.
I have supervised several doctoral candidates working on research that uses critical social theory, for example, Legitimation Code Theory, the sociology of knowledge in higher education, academic literacies and Cultural Historical Activity Theory to explore issues related to doctoral attrition, learning and teaching, curriculum development, practitioner identity and the development of literacy practices in higher education, mainly in the social sciences and humanities. My own work currently focuses on emotional and affective labour in doctoral and early career phases and the development of researcher identity linked to creating more inclusive, socially just and critically empathetic research cultures within universities.
Research areas
I started my research career interested in immigrants’ – particularly Muslim women’s – experiences of migrating into the EU. This was the focus of my initial postgraduate research at Honours and Masters level. But, jobs in gender studies and politics were hard to come by at that stage and I was offered part-time work teaching literacy and writing to first year students struggling to bridge the gap between school and university. This work led me to a university-based writing centre in Cape Town, which I managed for 6 years, learning a great deal about academic literacies, writing, and the politics of knowledge and knowing in higher education.
This led me to my doctoral research, which explored the ways in which knowledge is created through teaching and whether and how students are brought into crucial conversations about what knowledge is, how it is created in disciplinary (and extra-disciplinary) ways, and how they can join (and eventually challenge) conversations within their fields of practice and research. My initial postdoctoral work extended on this, and I published a sourcebook for lecturers and academic developers looking at turning access to higher education into greater success by making pedagogies more explicit and open to student engagement.
More recently, informed by my work with doctoral and early career researchers, and research supervisors, I have been reading, thinking and blogging about emotional labour and emotion work and how and why we need to pay greater attention to this in working with postgraduate, especially doctoral, students in higher education. I am currently working on a research project on representation, belonging, equity and inclusion in the university, understood through the theoretical lens of feminist sociologies of emotion, and the empirical lens of early career academia (including the doctoral period), as well as collaborating with colleagues on projects looking at understandings of the public good in doctoral education, and on compassionate and caring supervision praxis.
Underpinning all my research and practice is an abiding concern for social justice and how to better create, enable and enhance this in education and society. How do we truly make people feel at home in unfamiliar places and open up or change the construction and maintenance of these places so that others can become part of them—not through becoming like those who already belong, but through changing the place as they become part of it? How can students change practices of writing, knowing and speaking about knowledge by bringing their differents ways of knowing, being and doing to these practices, and how can academic lecturers and supervisors learn to recognise and value a wider range of practices related to knowledge making? How do we challenge and change hegemonic notions of academic socialisation, student deficit, and reified forms of knowledge and meaning-making? How do we meaningfully make it possible for more students to truly succeed in higher education? These critical questions drive my research and praxis forward, and shape the perspectives and insight I bring to bear on collaborations with peers.
External activity
I am the current managing editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. I serve on the editorial boards of Teaching in Higher Education and Higher Education, Research and Development, and I act as an assessor for Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision (short course) at Rhodes University.
I am a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University in South Africa, an Associate Member of the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building based at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a member of the Collaboratory Research Hub. I am also a member of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), of the International Doctoral Education and Research Network (IDERN), and of the Sociologies of Education Network in the European Educational Research Association (EERA).
Publications
Selected - for the full list please see my website:
Joubert, M. and Clarence, S. 2024. ‘Be more pirate’: Harnessing the power of liminal spaces in creating academic literacy practitioner identities and agency. In A. Ding and L. Monbec (eds). Practitioner Agency and Identity in English for Academic Purposes. Bloomsbury, pp. 122-135.
van Heerden, M. and Clarence, S. 2024. Amplifying candidates' voices: Using feedback conversations to develop and doctoral researcher identity and writing. In C. Rolph (ed). Surviving and Thriving in Academia: Supervising Doctoral Candidates. Emerald Publishing, pp. 107-122.
Clarence, S. and Wilmot, K. 2024. Navigating co-supervision: Creating supportive relationships between peers in supervision teams. In C. Rolph (ed). Surviving and Thriving in Academia: Supervising Doctoral Candidates. Emerald Publishing, 61-74.
Clarence, S. 2023. Reimagining the role of writing centres: From ‘safe spaces’ to ‘brave spaces’ in pursuit of equity and inclusion. In A. Rambiritch and L. Drennan (eds). Reimagining writing centre practices: A South African perspective. ESI Press, 1-22.
Clarence, S. and van Heerden, M. 2023. Doctor who? Developing a translation device for exploring successful doctoral being and becoming. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 11(1), 96-119.
Clarence, S. 2021. Turning access into success. Improving university education with Legitimation Code Theory. London: Routledge.
Clarence, S. 2021. Towards a theoretical framework for exploring emotion in doctoral education: Critically exploring familiar narratives in student experiences. In Rule, P., Bitzer, E. and Frick, L. (eds). The global scholar: Implications for postgraduate studies and supervision. Stellenbosch: SUNPress, 215-229.
Clarence, S. 2020. Making visible the affective dimensions of scholarship in postgraduate writing development work. Journal of Praxis in Higher Education, 2(1), 46-62.
Clarence, S. 2019. Exploring the gap between what we say and what we do: Writing centres, ‘safety’, and ‘risk’ in higher education. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus , Special issue for Sharifa Daniels: Space, Place and Power in South African Writing Centres, 117-130.
Clarence, S. and McKenna, S. 2017. ‘Developing academic literacies through understanding the nature of disciplinary knowledge’. London Review of Education, special issue on Academic Literacies. 15(1), 38-49.
van Heerden, M., Clarence, S., and Bharuthram, S. 2016. ‘What lies beneath: exploring the deeper purposes of feedback on student writing through considering disciplinary knowledge and knowers’. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 42(6): 967-977.