Socializing doctoral students the feminist way

Abstract

This paper highlights the perspective of five doctoral students’ socialization in a feminist focused research group. Utilizing collaborative ethnography, this paper challenges the current conceptions of graduate student socialization that emphasizes neoliberal values such as individualism and competition that is normalized within doctoral education. In this collaborative effort we highlight the lessons we learned and provide a critique of the norms of the socialization and intellectual growth based on our interactions with each other and faculty members of the Feminist Research Collective. This paper showcases the unique experience of each doctoral student. Each author provides first-hand accounts of the transformative work of participating in a research group that is feminist centered and based in an epistemology of care. We acknowledge the tensions we experienced in confronting our own held beliefs about the research process grounded in our own social conditions that are informed by our diverse backgrounds.