My journey through my Qualifying Exam using reflexivity and resonant text: ‘what I know’; ‘how I know it’; and ‘how I experience it’

Abstract

The Qualifying Examination (QE) is an important but, at the same time, isolated journey for doctoral students. Along with many other doctorate students in Public Health Sciences, I was provided with a description of the core requirements of my QE and left alone in a solitary journey of readings and writings. Reflexivity, the act of becoming aware of the self as author/researcher, and resonant text, the use of art as an expressive medium for personal learning, were not required during my QE. However, as a scholar, my ontological and epistemological knowledge is grounded in social‐critical/feminists paradigms, which encourage the use of reflexive practices to locate the researcher position during the research process. As a result, I felt the need to explore and disclose my research and personal identities during my QE process. Furthermore, I wanted to explore different forms of communicative mediums (e.g. art‐based/visual medium) to learn and disseminate knowledge. Using my personal experience, this paper tries to answer the question: How can reflexivity and resonant text help doctoral students to explore and understand their multiples selves during their QE? Following a feminist reflexive framework, I identified my multiple selves in relation to the literature that I reviewed. Furthermore, I created four resonant texts: Self; Sea of Text; Castle of Knowledge; and Lived History of Body and Gender. In reflecting on my QE journey, I am now aware of how my resonant texts become my way to re‐express ‘what I know’, ‘how I know it’, and ‘how I experience it’.