The Autoethnography of Asian Female Doctoral Students: Surviving and Thriving in American Higher Education

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Dismantling Oppression in Higher Education (Table 10)

Abstract

For international graduate students, transformation into a fully virtual environment signals an increased sense of precarity, isolation, and ambiguity. This study offers a description and analysis of Asian Female perspectives in navigating through the transformation. What started off as a daily accountability group turned into a critical friendship, with a strong sense of camaraderie, gathering those who otherwise would never have met in a real life. We offer three autoethnographic vignettes of Asian female Ph.D. students and analyze them using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). By doing so, we hope to fill in the gap of literature on the online writing community by providing a cultural lens in understanding how the sense of belonging emerges in implementing the online community.

Authors

• Ahreum Lim, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Daeun Jung, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• Eunsun Lee, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author