Graduate Student Stories #1
We are pleased to share this story with you as part of our forthcoming Graduate Student campaign that seeks to raise awareness of the unique experiences of violence and harm graduate students face. These harms exist on a broad spectrum ranging from sexualised violence to abuse of power by supervisors to racism to gatekeeping to bullying and harassment - and they all impact our lives, sense of self, and sense of place in academia.
It is our hope that as students come together and share their stories, we at SFCC can work to collectivise our experiences into resources and advocacy tools to better support graduate students in their journey.
If you are interested in sharing your story, please connect with us at outreach@sfcccanada.org!
In the crushing oppression of graduate programs, whether it comes through colonialism, ableism, capitalism, racism and all of the intersections, we are made to believe that we have no choice but to fit our experiences and knowledges into increasingly hostile systems and spaces. If we can’t support our work, calls for justice, accountability, and healing in ways deemed respectable or productive by these larger systems, we are taught through both positive and negative reinforcement that the work is not valid.
I have heard: “this work is too partial, too angry, or too risky for funders. Too anecdotal. Too emotional. Too methodologically and politically messy. Immature, unrealistic.”
Navigating these rules can squeeze us in so many ways. We can come out of it crushed, stretched, unwound, shuttered. We can feel betrayed, particularly by those who we believed shared our politics within larger institutions that talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion.
My supervisor said to me: “Don’t let your community control the timeline of this project or slow you down. Don’t worry about the ethical hoops they will make you jump through - just get it done.”
During the Fall of 2019, I was lucky enough to be in conversation with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and other Indigenous graduate students. I didn’t know how much I needed to be in a space where I didn’t have to explain what it was like to be in a very white program, in a very colonial department. I got to just be a person in a supportive, care-based, generative environment, sharing humbly and openly with others who were sharing humbly and openly.
We spoke of a great many things, weaving through the frustration of navigating the entitlement of academics to an explanation of Indigenous understanding to figuring out how we nourish the things that are our heart fires within academic spaces. In my little notebook from that day, our lingerings on topics of care, love, and support are boldly outlined and drawn around with medicines. “Academic processes are prohibiting us from feeling supported in new processes.” “Love is what grows such strong nations and is most attacked by colonial processes like rigour.” For scholars who are marginalised and harmed in academic spaces, rigour often looks different because we are here for different reasons—to support work already happening in our communities, to legitimate our stories or processes, or to learn about ourselves. When we are researching with and for our communities, we are practising a community “rigour” that is a deeply ethical and felt practice. My practice of rigorous care is developed and evolving in conversation with those participating in my research and supporting from the sidelines. It is built and enlivened through many hours of talking, eating, laughing, and singing together that has kept me going through this process. These are processes that do not follow institutional ethics, institutional timelines, institutional expectations.
Reflecting on the beauty and power I have experienced in working with community, it deepens the frustration I feel about the ways I have had to fight for being able to do my work in a good way. In a way that community, Elders, my heart were telling me to do the work. These efforts to work the way I needed to were efforts that could have gone into the community I was working with, into my own healing, into my thesis. I want to be clear that I would fight any day for the community I worked with and my teachings, but I didn’t think I would have to do it so regularly in an institution that claimed to be committed to be an “engaged university.”
My supervisor wrote in comments on my work about Indigenous storytelling and oral histories: “Are the people you are talking to lying? What are their sources?” Of a block quote where an Elder shares her dreams: “This doesn’t make sense. Cut this for word count.”
In my thesis I wrote “I have made the wrong decision to do this work through a master’s program in this academy” and I fought for those words to stay there too…as a sign post for all who might see it. Little bread crumbs that might lead a person on a different path.
But this process has also allowed me to see the importance of resisting the isolating effects of graduate school, of building community and power together in unexpected places. I could not have gotten through my program without knowing who I am and where I come from, the many communities that have gifted me with space and knowledge to grow in who I am, my dear colleagues in my program who always had my back, and the generations who had come before me who could make this space even a bit softer.
I share these pieces of my story about graduate school because I don’t want anyone else to feel alone in struggling through this mess. Post-secondary institutions - and graduate school in particular - were never meant for the thousands of women, non-binary, trans, disabled, Indigenous, Black, and low-income students currently trying to navigate the “ivory tower.” I feel like it is our responsibility and our deepest act of care to share our stories with each other and to collectivise our experiences to ease the trauma that the next generation of students will have to carry.