Addressing Manifestations of Segregative Injustice in the Doctoral process: The Case of International Students

• In Event: Uprooting Excessive Entitlement: A New Direction in Understanding and Dismantling Racial Injustice

Abstract

Background
Lacan (1971) offers a political reading of racism that transcends skin color and national or religious affiliations. According to him, if there are races, they are races that enjoy socio-economic, and cultural capital in today’s evolving market economy and the ensuing benefits of being positioned as excessively entitled. This insight is very relevant to the understanding of the issue of segregation experienced by international doctoral students in the context of French higher education.

Purpose
The aim of our investigation is to gain a better understanding of a) what gives rise to this unfair segregation of international doctoral students, b) how it manifests itself, and its impact on the experience of students on their doctoral pathway, c) the implications of the study for educators’ role in monitoring doctoral work and d) the nature of human relationships that can facilitate inclusion.

Perspectives
We use notions of Bourdieu’s cultural capital (1986) and Fricker’s epistemic injustice (2007), in order to understand what segregates international doctoral students from the more privileged ones, who, by virtue of the common tools of social interpretation they possess, are able to succeed.

Method
Our qualitive research is based on the doctoral follow-up of international students we have documented. The sample we investigate comprises doctoral students in the process of completing their thesis, doctoral students who have successfully completed their thesis, and doctoral students who have dropped out during the course of their thesis preparation. We use semi-structured interviews focusing on participants' narratives of experience of segregation, which we examine using a combination of psychoanalytical analysis (Lacan, 1971) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013).
Findings
For each of the marginalized group in our study, regardless of ethnicity, we note a mismatch between institutional expectations and the support offered for students to make sense of these expectations. The second point we note is the difficulty felt by students to share their concerns, to benefit from guidance, not least in the form of clarification of expectations: the instructions for use tend to elude them. Finally, they generally downplay segregation problems and have difficulty positioning themselves as knowledge producers in the interactions with their supervisors.
Significance
We hope to draw the attention of researchers involved in doctoral supervision to the subject of international student segregation, and provide information that may bring greater consideration to the damage caused by excessive faculty entitlement, and help faculty contribute to overcoming epistemic injustice these segregated students suffer.

Authors

• Magdalena Kohout-Diaz, University of Bordeaux

• Marie-Christine Deyrich, University of Bordeaux