Countering Essentialism: A Brazilian Graduate Student Navigating Identities in an American Doctoral Program

• In Event: Resilience in Exile: Immigrant Students’ Agency and Identity in New Educational Spaces

Abstract

This study challenges homogenized and essentialist views of international graduate students by providing a counternarrative of a Brazilian student’s first year in a U.S. doctoral program. By employing autoethnography and queer theory, I analyze how I negotiated and performed my identities during my first year in an educational doctoral program. This study challenges fixed identity representations and essentialist portrayals of international students, and examines how the researcher’s identities shift and perform across different sociocultural contexts. The preliminary findings highlight the need for research to account for the complexities of individual experiences and warn against reducing students to essentialist categories. It advocates for a deeper understanding of international students' unique challenges and contributions, calling for more nuanced and reflective research practices.

Author

• Mariana de França Steil, University of Southern California