On Becoming Irresponsible Feminists: Graduate Student Socialization to Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Being Irresponsible: A Feminist Undoing of Academic Research

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.

A major component of this collaborative autoethnography is reflexivity. Reflexivity, a tenet of feminist research, serves as a primary analytic tool to elicit stories on our own lived experiences and understand these experiences through a gendered and racialized lens. We provided space to interrogate our own ideas and what we learned through our participation in the Feminist Research Collective. We gathered and processed our experiences through individual responses to writing prompts and collective reflexivity through our shared dialogue. This was necessary in the process to deeply interrogate and understand each other and ourselves in a project specific to our growth and development as up and coming scholars in our fields. A collective reflexivity pushes back against standard academic norms, allowing us to acknowledge our own expertise in the realm of graduate student socialization and to validate the experiences each of us has faced or witnessed.

This paper showcases the unique experience of each doctoral student. Each author provides anecdotal evidence 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.

This paper honors creativity and individuality while also moving forward a collective statement. The presentation of our individual perspectives includes poetry, images, collages, song lyrics, and direct quotes from our reflections. Our findings are unique and provide direct insight into what we learned. The implications section of the paper is a collective statement to academia that reimagines a better world for graduate students centered on epistemic diversity of a true collaborative learning environment.

Authors

• Suparna Bose, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Dajanae Palmer, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Pooja Saxena, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Samantha Silberstein, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

• Sylvia Christina Washington, Indiana University - Bloomington