Haunting the Ivory Tower: Academic Trauma, Blackness, and the Future of Doctoral Education

• In Event: We Wrote Ourselves In: The Doctoral Student Writing Collective as a Blueprint for Belonging

Abstract

In the pursuit of doctoral education, Black students often find themselves navigating a terrain marked by erasure, surveillance, and harm—spaces where they are hyper-visible as symbols of diversity and simultaneously invisible in institutional support and care. This paper draws from a forthcoming book chapter that explores the concept of academic trauma as experienced by Black doctoral students, theorizing the university as a site of structural and interpersonal violence, where whiteness is maintained through silence, control, and symbolic inclusion. Drawing on personal narrative, autoethnography, and critical race frameworks, this paper interrogates the material and affective consequences of pursuing knowledge and freedom in environments never meant to hold us.

The objectives of this paper are threefold: (1) to articulate a framework of academic trauma grounded in lived experiences of racialized violence within graduate education; (2) to examine how Black doctoral students resist and reimagine their educational journeys despite institutional betrayal; and (3) to contribute to a broader scholarly dialogue that positions Black survival, care, and community as central to transforming doctoral education.

This work is guided by Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017), Black feminist thought (hooks, 1994), and the concept of “haunting” as defined by Avery Gordon (1997), which frames trauma as both present and ghostly—a force that refuses to be silenced. The university, in this context, functions as both a producer and denier of harm. Through the lens of haunting, this paper analyzes how Black doctoral students carry the weight of historical exclusion, familial expectation, and institutional neglect, while being called upon to perform gratitude, excellence, and resilience.

Methodologically, this paper relies on autoethnographic reflection, coupled with thematic analysis of narratives shared within Black doctoral writing spaces. These stories reveal shared experiences of advisor abuse, racial gaslighting, erasure in the classroom, and the weaponization of academic gatekeeping. Yet, these same students also cultivate sites of resistance—writing collectives, peer mentoring groups, spiritual practices, and acts of refusal—through which they reclaim power and presence.

The findings suggest that academic trauma is not merely an individual psychological experience, but a patterned and institutionalized phenomenon. It manifests through microaggressions, structural silences, and the complicity of academic norms that prioritize output over well-being. Importantly, the paper emphasizes the agency and creativity of Black students who, despite harm, continue to produce knowledge, support one another, and imagine freer academic futures.

This paper contributes to the literature on doctoral education, racial equity, and critical pedagogy by naming and theorizing academic trauma as a distinct and urgent issue. It calls on scholars, institutions, and policymakers to move beyond performative inclusion toward transformative care. Aligned with AERA’s theme of “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures,” this work insists that we must not only remember how Black scholars have been harmed—but also invest in structures that affirm their presence, honor their labor, and safeguard their futures.

Authors

• Da'Ja'Nay Askew, Indiana University

• Tim Herd, University of California - Los Angeles