Confronting racialised temporal inequalities: A post-colonial analysis of Zhihu users’ portrayals of doctoral supervisors in Western academia

When navigating the confusing scene of doctoral applications to Western higher education institutions, international and racialised doctoral applicants sometimes turn to online question-and-answer fora such as Zhihu in China for advice. How then, do such social media fora portray the desirability of doctoral supervisors from diverse racial backgrounds? Drawing on critical race theory, postcolonial critiques of the ‘modern time’ and conceptions of academic time, this article conducts a thematic analysis of 450 Zhihu comments and unpacks how the internalisation and normalisation of white privilege are embedded in a steep racialised temporal hierarchy. This article argues that the Zhihu comments construct a racialised temporal order in which (1) racialised doctoral supervisors are positioned as already ‘too late’ in time and modernity, their intensive supervisory practices recoded as the residue of tradition, and their time depicted as devalued, stolen, and illegitimised, while (2) white supervisors are construed as moderators of time itself, portrayed as gaining time and recognition and becoming symbols of ‘cool’ and ‘safe’ supervision. This article further proposes three provocations to tackle such constructions of racialised temporal inequalities in doctoral supervision. These include (1) accentuating the unquantifiable nature of ‘racial time’ as an intervention in and of itself and refusing to legitimise ‘white time’; (2) recognising the complicated roles of social media fora like Zhihu in perpetuating racial hierarchies while also acknowledging their potential in facilitating debates to challenging global white supremacy; and (3) channelling such time-focused findings to foster ‘critical collaborative communities’. Empirically, this article makes contributions by unpacking how these Zhihu comments revealed that normalisation of ‘white time’ leads to unequal access to resources for both white and racialised doctoral supervisors. Theoretically, it contributes by pinpointing how time is racialised as well as how race is temporalised in doctoral supervision.