Re/membering scholarly bodies : a body mapping approach to exploring phd student be(com)ings in the neoliberal academy
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[EMBARGOED UNTIL 12/01/2025] Informed by indigenous and poststructural feminist philosophies, this project centered bodily experience as knowledge to challenge the underlying assumptions of PhD student socialization and provide space for doctoral students to socialize each other differently. The core aims of the project were to understand how neoliberal discourse implicitly shapes doctoral student socialization, how students embody this socialization, and how collective socialization through body mapping can be used as a tool of neoliberal refusal. Using an in-relation body mapping method, this study explored two questions: What are PhD students' embodied experiences of be(com)ing through their socialization into a neoliberal academy? What is generated through the use of an in-relation body mapping methodology to explore PhD experiences? Throughout the study, participants shared complex and contradictory relationships with the academy, including pain, pleasure, joy, stress, love, conflict, and purpose. Findings indicated that mechanisms of informal socialization such as observed norms, rituals, and behaviors, storytelling from mentors and peers, and broader sociocultural narratives around higher education shaped participants' understandings of what it meant to be a scholar. Through these informal interactions, participants internalized neoliberal logics expressed in the form of academic guilt, and feelings of not enoughness, and foreboding. The manuscript demonstrates how participants' everyday decision-making around how they chose to show up in the academy involved ongoing negotiations between a desire to be authentic, perceived expectations of what is acceptable, and perceived risk. Findings also demonstrate body mapping as an in-relation method that provided time and space for participants to connect with the fullness of their experiences, reflect deeply on implicit assumptions held about the academy, and reconnect to purpose. The manuscript invites the readers to reflect on and make sense of their own be(com)ings as scholars through intentional pauses and engagement with study data. The dissertation concludes by sharing important implications for extending methodology, future research, and praxis.
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Ph. D.