Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers

Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kirsten T. Edwards, Alexandria Lockett, Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kirsten T. Edwards, Alexandria Lockett

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781607329572
• eBook ISBN: 9781607329589
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers is a timely resource for understanding and resolving some of the issues graduate students face, particularly as higher education begins to pay more critical attention to graduate student success. Offering diverse approaches for assisting this demographic, the book bridges the gap between theory and practice through structured examination of graduate students' narratives about their development as writers, as well as researched approaches for enabling these students to cultivate their craft.

The first half of the book showcases the voices of graduate student writers themselves, who describe their experiences with graduate school literacy through various social issues like mentorship, access, writing in communities, and belonging in academic programs. Their narratives illuminate how systemic issues significantly affect graduate students from historically oppressed groups. The second half accompanies these stories with proposed solutions informed by empirical findings that provide evidence for new practices and programming for graduate student writers.

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers values student experience as an integral part of designing approaches that promote epistemic justice. This text provides a fresh, comprehensive, and essential perspective on graduate writing and communication support that will be useful to administrators and faculty across a range of disciplines and institutional contexts.
 
Contributors: Noro Andriamanalina, LaKela Atkinson, Daniel V. Bommarito, Elizabeth Brown, Rachael Cayley, Amanda E. Cuellar, Kirsten T. Edwards, Wonderful Faison, Amy Fenstermaker, Jennifer Friend, Beth Godbee, Hope Jackson, Karen Keaton Jackson, Haadi Jafarian, Alexandria Lockett, Shannon Madden, Kendra L. Mitchell, Michelle M. Paquette, Shelley Rodrigo, Julia Romberger, Lisa Russell-Pinson, Jennifer Salvo-Eaton, Richard Sévère, Cecilia D. Shelton, Pamela Strong Simmons, Jasmine Kar Tang, Anna K. Willow Treviño, Maurice Wilson, Anne Zanzucchi

Part 1

Voices

1

The Trauma of Graduate Education

Graduate Writers Countering Epistemic Injustice and Reclaiming Epistemic Rights

Beth Godbee

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329589.c001

When there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem. When you can’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.

—Kimberlé Crenshaw

Introduction

During my graduate education, I began an empirical study of collaborative writing talk, or one-with-one writing conferences, seeking to identify the power and potential of this talk. I experienced a sense of “transformation” as both a writer and tutor in one-with-one conferences (Godbee 2012), and I noted that many scholars in writing studies similarly attributed extracurricular writing talk as having transformative potential (e.g., Denny 2010; Gere 1994; Heller 1997; Whitney 2008). These initial observations led me to videotape conferences and interview writers and educators involved in ongoing partnerships, in both campus and community writing centers. From this study emerged several focus populations, among them graduate student women, as their work of “asserting the right to belong” in academia emerged as particularly poignant (Godbee and Novotny 2014).

Graduate writers are expected to produce particularly complex and high-stakes writing, from first publications and original research to CVs and other job search materials. They also navigate complex asymmetrical power relations when working with faculty advisors, committee members, employers, and disciplinary colleagues. At the same time, graduate writers are working to create space for themselves and their research projects, commitments, and contributions within higher education. The challenges abound but also emerge differently and with different consequences depending on how graduate writers are (institutionally + historically + socially + culturally) positioned. Listening to participants, I heard a chorus of struggles—and downright trauma—associated with graduate education. In articulating what was helpful in making it through the trauma, participants emphasized the importance of writing conferences as essential “therapy”—that is, academic or writing therapy. Without exception, every graduate writer in my study used the words “therapy” or “healing” to describe the psychological and emotional benefits of their collaborative writing partnerships.

From these starting points, I describe in this chapter the trauma of graduate education, particularly for people marginalized within academia. In addition to facing everyday microaggressions (e.g., Gomez, Khurshid, Freitag, and Lachuk 2011; Sue 2010), many graduate writers experience epistemic injustice, or harm in their capacity as knowers (e.g., Alcoff 1999; Fricker 2007). Rather than presenting an empirical study, I use stories from research and experience to build our collective linguistic resources for talking about the trauma of graduate education, the problem of epistemic injustice, and the potential of epistemic rights. To do so, the chapter is organized into three sections: (1) defining epistemic injustice; (2) countering epistemic injustice, affirming epistemic rights; and (3) valuing feminist co-mentoring. After defining epistemic injustice, I call for educators to affirm writers’ epistemic rights, or the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. And I highlight cases of graduate student women of color who collaboratively affirm and assert their epistemic rights—work that illustrates why feminist co-mentoring matters in graduate education.1

Identifying Trauma and Injustice in Graduate Education

The literature on graduate writing and writers includes attention to writing groups (e.g., Aitchison 2009; Aitchison and Guerin 2014); to providing support for graduate writers across disciplines (e.g., Brooks-Gillies, Garcia, Kim, Manthey, and Smith 2015; Lawrence and Zawacki 2016); and to the experiences of and need to support faculty writers (e.g., Boice 1990; Geller and Eodice 2013). Cross-disciplinary literature also addresses the need for various types of mentoring: not only mentoring by faculty members and dissertation advisors (e.g., Eble and Gaillet 2008; Wiltshire 1998) but especially peer or co-mentoring with and among graduate students (e.g., Goeke, Klein, Garcia-Reid, Birnbaum, Brown, and Degennaro 2011; McGuire and Reger 2003; Patton 2009). Together, this literature suggests the importance of ongoing and structured feedback from multiple in-field and out-of-field, expert and non-expert readers. It draws our attention to the need for support structures like writing groups and one-with-one conferences, as well as the value of the support colleagues and friends provide as mentors.

What has been under-addressed in this literature is the need to counter the trauma associated with graduate education, a trauma Black queer feminist sociologist Eric Anthony Grollman addresses in his blog Write Where It Hurts. In a March 16, 2016 post, “Recovering from Graduate School: Rewriting the Trauma Narrative,” Grollman argues that to recover from graduate school, it is important to “rewrite the trauma narrative.” For Grollman, this rewriting involves “writ[ing] down every challenging, offensive, and potentially traumatizing event or condition” that can be remembered; naming these experiences as trauma—that is, identifying “just how traumatizing graduate school was”; and then rewriting the narrative to include moments of “pushing back,” “defining [your] career for [your]self,” or “defying mainstream expectations.” Such rewriting is a process of recasting and reclaiming agency within graduate education and of healing from the trauma. And trauma itself is more widespread than typically realized, as illustrated by the related special issue of Praxis on graduate writers and equity (see, e.g., Cedric Burrows’s “Writing While Black: The Black Tax on African-American Graduate Writers” [2016] and Neisha-Anne Green’s “The Re-Education of Neisha-Anne Green: A Close Look at the Damaging Effects of ‘A Standard Approach,’ the Benefits of Code-Meshing, and the Role Allies Play in This Work” [2016]).

To explain the trauma of graduate education, we might look to the edited collection Presumed Incompetent (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemann, González, and Harris 2012), which provides a framework and the language for interpreting the many compounding experiences that lead graduate students and faculty women of color—and those of us with marginalized identities—to experience our worth as diminished within higher education. As editors Angela P. Harris and Carmen G. González (2012) explain in their introduction, the same systemic inequities, pervasive biases, and daily microaggressions that are part of the world around us permeate higher education. And inequities and injustices are further amplified because “the culture of academia is distinctly white, heterosexual, and middle- and upper-middle-class. Those who differ from this norm find themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘presumed incompetent’ by students, colleagues, and administrators” (3). This experience is widespread and saturated within campus climates, faculty-student relationships, and social hierarchies in academia. It represents both individual and collective experience, and it thrives in current challenges facing higher education, including corporatization of universities, shifts in academic labor toward non-tenure-track and part-time positions, and the treatment of education as commodity and students as consumers (5–6). Yet, despite its widespread and insidious nature, the condition of being “presumed incompetent” often goes unnamed, making it more easily internalized by those who are marginalized and written off by those with privilege and power.

To illustrate, Brenda J. Allen (2012) describes the impact of the book and its title—Presumed Incompetent—on a colleague, a Black woman faculty member, who responded, “‘That was exactly my experience in grad school. . . . You just don’t know what I went through . . . I can’t believe how much this still hurts’” (17). By all measures, this colleague was thriving in higher education, having passed her dissertation “with flying colors,” having earned a tenure-track position and then tenure and promotion, and having succeeded at both her home institution and within her profession. Yet, the experience of being “presumed incompetent” marked her experience along this journey and still brought much hurt—much trauma (Grollman 2016)—related to “feeling unwelcome” and facing ongoing “strife” and “struggles” within the work (Allen 2012, 17). What this colleague relates, Allen says, reflects the reports of “countless other women of color graduate students and faculty members who have shared stories similar to this young woman’s” (17). And it certainly reflects the experiences shared with me by graduate writers in my own qualitative study.

I begin with these stories of trauma and of being presumed incompetent because they represent the injustice that is part and parcel of graduate education for many graduate writers, particularly for people who don’t match the “mythical norm.” As Audre Lorde (1984) explains, “In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure” (116). And this norm defines what is valued and expected within academia to such a high degree that the connections are often implicit, if not hidden, from view. For instance, the valuing of rationality and “value-free science” connects with masculinity and the Western intellectual tradition (Harris and González 2012, 4–5). In turn, “rigorous” or “objective” research gets prioritized in ways that value not only mythical-norm people but also the epistemologies (ways of knowing, being, and acting) associated with the norm. Concomitantly, preferences for the mythical norm carry over into teaching so that white, male instructors are strongly favored—by men and women, white people and people of color alike (6).

The unconscious bias that leads to the favoring of mythical-norm research/researchers and mythical-norm teaching/teachers further influences hiring practices, committee reviews, and systems of tenure and promotion. In these high-stakes contexts, “unconscious bias triggers greater scrutiny of the presumptively incompetent applicants of color while the flaws of white male applicants [or thesis or dissertation writers] are minimized or disregarded” (Harris and González 2012, 8). Such differential valuing means graduate writers who are marginalized face what philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) refers to as an “identity-prejudicial credibility deficit,” or “epistemic deficit,” meaning that structural prejudice operates on the hearer’s part to give the speaker less credibility (17). This deficit is in opposition to an epistemic or credibility excess that benefits people with privilege and institutional power who are readily listened to/for based on their mythical-norm identities. When graduate writers are presumed to be incompetent, they face not only epistemic deficit but also are further disadvantaged/differentiated from those who have an inflated or excess credibility. The result, Fricker terms, is “epistemic injustice,” or “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (1).

I turn next to considering the manifestation of two forms of epistemic injustice within graduate education and a range of primary and secondary harms that result from this injustice. Such a discussion, I hope, helps us name and identify what many graduate writers face, as well as helps us imagine and make interventions toward countering this deep injustice.

Defining Epistemic Injustice

The work of higher education is work within the knowledge economy, and as such, it involves dealing in—reading, responding to, challenging, and contributing—knowledge. Such work is inherently epistemological, involving ways of knowing, making meaning, experiencing, and articulating (i.e., writing) the world. And such work is not value neutral but instead value laden, with particular ways of knowing valued over others (see, e.g., Deloria 1970; Yosso 2005). This context matters for graduate writers who must navigate their own and others’ epistemic agency, entitlement, and rights. Among the many philosophers interested in these matters, Fricker provides in-depth analysis in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice in which she explores the associations among power, prejudice, and the ethics of knowing. Fricker identifies two types of epistemic injustice: (1) testimonial injustice and (2) hermeneutical injustice. Both these types, I maintain, relate to graduate writers, particularly writers who don’t fit the mythical norm and are presumed incompetent within academia.

First, “testimonial injustice” refers to epistemic deficit or the experience of being “perceived incompetent,” as it “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” (Fricker 2007, 1). It occurs whenever prejudice (often implicit and unconscious) leads a hearer/reader to give less credibility to a speaker/writer than otherwise would be given (4). Fricker offers the example of police officers and juries not believing Black defendants, witnesses, and others because they are Black. Testimonial injustice can also be seen in situations like the Flint water crisis: though community members knew and reported a number of problems with their tap water, their knowledge was downplayed, if not disbelieved. It was not until professors, physicians, and researchers became involved and verified lead contamination that the media took notice and a state of emergency was declared (see Lurie [2016] for a timeline). Testimonial injustice wrongs people in their capacity to share experiences, give information, and construct new knowledge.

Within academia, we might think of stories like the one Linda Martin Alcoff (1999) relates of an untenured Chicana philosophy professor who suffered undermining complaints from a white male teaching assistant (TA). Not until a senior white professor suffered the same sort of complaints did colleagues support the untenured professor. Fricker uses this example to explain double testimonial injustice, or the problem of not being believed about not being believed. In this case, a first testimonial injustice occurred when the TA undermined the faculty member’s teaching, and a second testimonial injustice arose when departmental colleagues failed to believe her reports about the undermining. This double testimonial injustice deeply impacted the untenured faculty member “as a giver of knowledge” (Fricker 48), and we can infer similar impacts on graduate writers, who also occupy positions of institutional instability and vulnerability. As Burrows (2016) writes about “the Black tax,” Black graduate writers are often called into question: we find evidence in his own account of being questioned by a white tutor in the writing center. Put simply, testimonial injustice undermines one’s credibility and related confidence, achievements, sense of self-worth, and even personhood.

Second, though often working in conjunction with testimonial injustice, “hermeneutical injustice” manifests “at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker 2007, 1). Whereas the experience of being perceived incompetent represents testimonial injustice, the creation of the term perceived incompetent helps correct the hermeneutical injustice of having this experience unnamed and largely unknown. Fricker shows that, historically, naming and defining concepts like sexual harassment and postpartum depression have helped correct for “hermeneutical inequality” (162). When these critical concepts were named, new understandings “awakened hitherto dormant resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility” (148). Such naming counters epistemic marginalization and can open channels—from collective consciousness raising to the pursuit of economic or legal recourse—for challenging injustice.

Again, turning to academia, I think of a story of my own. In my graduate program, students were regularly taking a year or more to move from the prelim defense (earning AB...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Valuing Lived Experiences and Community Mentorship
• Part 1: Voices
• Part 2: Bridges and Borders
• Part 3: Approaches
• About the Contibutors
• Index