Our restive selves: a collaborative autoethnography on confronting complicity in neoliberal doctoral socialization

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As institutions of higher education continue to evolve and adopt neoliberal ideologies, doctoral student socialization is increasingly shaped by logic and exacerbated for students of color. In this paper, we use the five tenets, privatized consumerism, precarity, competitive individualism, surveillance, and declining morality, offered by Museus and LePeau derived from a postsecondary education context. To understand this experience, we as three Asian American women in an education doctoral program utilize Kimoto’s theorization of restiveness and collaborative autoethnography to examine and untangle our complicities in contributing to neoliberal doctoral socialization. By employing a restive orientation, we acknowledge and discuss our complicities as a pathway towards continual collective consciousness-raising, self-reflexivity, and collective care.