The Vulnerable Graduate Student: Learning Silence and Compliance in the University

• In Event: Power, Policy, and Belonging in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper uses autoethnographic storytelling to examine the vulnerable status of the graduate student in the academic hierarchy and to explore the ways that graduate students learn to stay silent and compliant. In recounting two specific autoethnographic narratives from my personal experiences as a graduate student in education, I bring attention to the ways that marginalizing structures, precarious positionings, and their accompanying fears, can engender silence within the status quo. In sharing about my own guilt and shame, I aim to use personal story as both a method of inquiry to disrupt the fallacy of the necessity of silence and also as a form of therapeutic catharsis.

Author

• Christopher Hu, The University of Alabama