ArticleLJMU has developed LJMU Research Online for users to access the research output of the University more effectively. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LJMU Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain.The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of the record. Please see the repository URL above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. personal knowledge and experience of the substantive subject (lone motherhood) that her supervisors lack, as well as a reservoir of cultural knowledge as an insider. However, as this account makes clear, the student herself was in some ways not known to herself as a lone mother, this not being a cultural category she could readily encounter in her home country.The notion of insider/outsider not only distinguishes between supervisors and student but also marks further complications within the student's status of 'insider'. The notion of 'inside', then, is fragmented.Overall, we aim to unearth some of the hidden uncertainties of supervised researching, thinking and writing, as well as making more explicit the relations that accompany such knowledge construction. Thus the aim is to develop a focused kind of intercultural understanding that brings issues of 'difference' into play in an extensive way and where reflexivity from all parties is drawn upon in order to form successful supervisory relationships (Robinson-Pant, 2005). In that sense the 'layers' of the text aspire to an emergent and iterative interpretation, whereby successive readings, mis-readings and rereadings allow data to be re-interpreted and put in a broader, deeper and more reciprocal context. In doing this we are shifting away from the "orthodox model of distance and separation" on behalf of the researcher, to the disclosure model of interactive interviews (Ellis and Berger, 2003, p. 469). Such 'disclosure' should not be seen in a confessional light, and we would prefer 'dis-closure' as a different marker of 'opening up'. The dangers of Doctoral supervision: Lone mother, lone researcher 4 contaminating subjectivity, self-indulgence and narcissism are never very far away from a reflexive approach (Etherington, 2004) such as autoethnography (Sparkes, 2000). And this kind of multiple reflexivity (one Doctoral student and three supervisors) perhaps multiplies these risks. Where the student 'speaks' alone, the first person is employed. Other sections of the paper were written collaboratively and employ the collective pronoun 'we'.