Mapping research journeys across complex terrain with heavy baggage

In this article we review our experience of collaborating in the design and delivery of multidisciplinary training and support programmes for doctoral students and our attempts to locate models and metaphors for research planning and implementation which travel well across disciplines. We extend the metaphor of the journey to conceptualize a mapping of the Ph.D. process and examine the extent to which research students from widely divergent backgrounds may travel together and help each other navigate towards their destinations. We explore some issues of culture and communication involved in working in an interdisciplinary context, showing how we have been provoked to reflect critically on our own research identities and locations in the process of working together. We also identify some tensions between the assumptions about research development embodied in recent government policy documents and the lived experience of the research students with whom we work.