In “The Trauma of Graduate Education: Graduate Writers Countering Epistemic Injustice and Reclaiming Epistemic Rights,” Beth Godbee discusses the epistemic injustice that many graduate writers feel. Epistemic injustice refers to the way that graduate writers are “presumed incompetent”, especially when their ways of knowing do not match the traditional white, male norms of academia.

I am a white woman who grew up in a working class/farming community of South Dakota. While my whiteness brings privilege to my place in academia, I certainly related to the “epistemic injustice” and “presumed incompetence” described in Godbee’s article. I am the first in my family to go to college, so I felt the weight of class and gender as I navigated my role as a graduate student many years ago. There was so much I did not know, and I interpreted the not-knowing as a problem with me. Godbee calls for feminist co-mentoring in graduate education to overcome this. This mentoring occurs during writing conferences and is akin to therapy. The act of sharing personal ideas and experiences and having a mentor say “yes, that is exactly right” can affirm that personal experiences are not necessarily wrong, just not well-represented in academia.  It allows graduate students to push back and re-write the narrative of their own experiences as teachers and scholars, and this creates a sense of healing. 

Godbee begins her article with a quote from Kimberle Crenshaw on the value of naming a problem in order to solve it and address it. This idea is what Godbee calls “hermeneutical injustice.”

Her point about naming things is important because naming things is the first step to healing. This reminds me of my son’s struggles at school. He struggled learning to read, but his Kindergarten teacher insisted that it would all click. Two years later, he still struggled and his dyslexia and ADHD were finally identified. Naming his struggle helped identify appropriate interventions and gave my son permission to move from blaming himself for “being dumb” because he could not read and write as well as his peers. Seeing others who share his struggles makes him feel less alone and gives him space to acknowledge that his brain works differently than his peers, but that does mean that the way he sees the world is wrong. 

They say that too often, the response to these challenges comes in the form of singular self-care: individuals who show resilience, “boot-strappiness,” and mindfulness should be able to overcome these challenges on their own.  However, Tang and Andriamanalina critique this approach and call on institutions as a whole to address these challenges. They discuss how graduate advisors can express praise and shame that is problematic. Advisor feedback can (un)intentionally erase the individual experiences of underrepresented voices in academia. Advisor feedback can also create pressure for graduate writers to change their voice or represent their communities in a certain way.

This article is based on research done in a focus group of thirty-two doctoral students from BIPOC communities. These graduate writers share their personal stories of coping in academia. I like the way the authors collect this data because a quote about a personal experience can often reflect or add to the scientific data but in a more eloquent or poetic way. 

I find that personal stories complement the understanding that comes from objective research, and can be even more powerful. Objective, scientific reports allow me to know something in my mind, but personal stories allow me to know something in my heart. They allow me to “get the point” in a more profound way. For example, the title of this article, “I Cut Off My Hand and Gave It to You, and You Gave It Back to Me with Three Fingers” is a quote from a graduate writer in the focus group. This quote speaks to me much more powerfully than a bunch of statistics or objective data. 

I also connect to what Tang and Andriamanalina say about singular self-care and institutional support to my professional life. At my institution, there has been a lot of recent focus on self-care, but it can feel performative. We all do a breathing exercise together, and that is supposed to be sufficient to address the challenging working conditions educators face. However, when faculty advocate for structural or curriculum changes to really address the challenges of teaching or share concerns about what we see in the classroom, they are dismissed as ‘anecdotal.’ Data is a useful tool, but personal stories are also a kind of data, and I fear that the personal too often gets lost in our bureaucratic and ‘objective’ institutions.