Appropriating WhatsApp-mediated postgraduate supervision to negotiate “relational authenticity” in resource-constrained environments

Despite the surging prominence of literature that explores mobile instant messaging’s (MIM) capacity to leverage transformative pedagogical practices in higher education, studies that unravel the appropriation of MIM to leverage postgraduate supervision in authentic learning contexts are less frequent. Consequently, a gap persists on the nature of postgraduate supervisees’ existential and relational authenticity as they interface with MIM and supervisors during their consultation processes. This study drew on Heidegger’s existential authenticity, a netnography of WhatsApp-based supervisor–supervisee consultations and in-depth interviews to unravel how WhatsApp-mediated postgraduate supervision fosters the social construction of relational and existential authenticity in resource-constrained contexts. The findings suggest that authentic supervision was constructed through supervisor–supervisees’ negotiation of academic hierarchies, supervisees’ self-expression and self-disclosure, their management of moments of anxiety and conflict deflation in ambivalent supervision scenarios. The study recommends that supervisors need to manage the significant yet unrecognised “nervous moments” in technology-mediated supervision environments, where compression of hierarchy may be conflated with negation of the supervisor’s authority.