Socializing doctoral students the feminist way

Abstract

This paper highlights the perspective of five doctoral students’ socialization in a feminist focused research group. Utilizing collaborative ethnography, this paper challenges the current conceptions of graduate student socialization that emphasizes neoliberal values such as individualism and competition that is normalized within doctoral education. In this collaborative effort we highlight the lessons we learned and provide a critique of the norms of the socialization and intellectual growth based on our interactions with each other and faculty members of the Feminist Research Collective. This paper showcases the unique experience of each doctoral student. Each author provides first-hand accounts of the transformative work of participating in a research group that is feminist centered and based in an epistemology of care. We acknowledge the tensions we experienced in confronting our own held beliefs about the research process grounded in our own social conditions that are informed by our diverse backgrounds.

Keywords:

• Doctoral socialization
• feminist epistemology
• collaborative autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 When Lord Ram went in search of the golden deer for her beloved wife Sita and didn’t return for a long time, Sita asked his younger brother to go find him. He was reluctant to leave her alone, so drew a line outside her hut and asked her not to cross it, no matter what. The story goes that Ravana came in the guise of a beggar and asked her to cross the line or else he wouldn’t accept bhiksha(charity) from her. Sita crossed the line and Ravana kidnapped her, which later resulted in war between Ravana and Ram and resulted in victory of good over evil.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dajanae Palmer

Dajanae Palmer is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Missouri. Her research interests are in examining and uplifting the experiences of graduate students, exploring feminist methodologies, and using critical theories to analyze the systems of domination in higher education.

Sylvia Washington

Sylvia C. Washington is an Associate Director of Gender and LGBT Q+ Student Life at Denison University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education and Student Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research interests include identity development, race and gender in popular culture, and intersectionality of Black womanhood.

Samantha Silberstein

Samantha Silberstein is an Assistant Professor at UNC Wilmington. Her scholarship explores students' co-curricular and non-curricular learning, recognizing that learning is not isolated to the classroom but exists holistically. She employs creative methodologies to center the voices of participants while critiquing dominant environments through a critical whiteness and feminist lens.

Pooja Saxena

Pooja Saxena is an Assistant Professor of Education at Cottey College, Missouri. Her research brings together sociocultural aspects of education policy and learning theories to advance our understanding of the sociocultural structures that impact institutional policy and reproduce themselves to impact women's achievement behavior and aspirations in STEM fields.

Suparna Bose

Suparna Bose is an Academic Advisor and Retention Specialist and a Doctoral Candidate in Curriculum & Instruction. Her dissertation focuses on the stories of the funds of knowledge told by multilingual English composition students in their self-reflections. Her research interests center ESL/EFL writing and teaching; diversity, equity, inclusion; and feminism.