A longstanding and significant disparity in representation across gender, economic status, ethnicity, race, and sexual identity exists within STEM doctoral training. Most of the research on the retention and attrition of minoritized PhD STEM students focuses on individual factors, rather than system level issues. To address these gaps, we…

This article serves to contextualize and problematize reflexivity as a construct for restorying the truths told by doctoral students in qualitative dissertation research. First, it gives an overview of Webster University's EdD program and its inception of requiring qualitative research coursework for contextualizing the importance of qualitative…

Despite the significant contributions of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to scientific research, the environments in which they work and learn often offer inconsistent mentorship and professional development opportunities and only intermittently address their mental, financial, and social well-being. To examine mentorship, well-being,…

Supervision of doctoral students is challenging because it is a complex process in which the relationship between doctoral students and supervisors is formed. A good supervision program involves a relationship that depends on certain circumstances, frameworks, prior experiences of supervisors, personalities of supervisors and doctoral students,…

Increasingly, doctoral education is being challenged to reflect and act on issues of access and equity. I argue that in art and design the expanding doctoral expectations and emphasis on doctoral community impact the multiple and intersectional concerns around diversity, equity and belonging that urgently need to be acknowledged and addressed. The…

The purpose of this qualitative, transformational, phenomenological, action research study is to ascertain how race, class, and gender coalesce to impact the success of Black women at predominantly white institutions. The term "success" in the context of this study holds layered meanings, particularly from a Black feminist perspective…

This paper explored the multiple layers of social and intercultural adjustment challenges experienced by international female doctoral students in Australia. The paper investigates multiple dimensions of sociocultural differences between the students' native and host countries, including sociocultural context, community engagement, personal and…

For nearly 60 years, doctoral student attrition has been a cause for concern (Berelson, 1960; Council of Graduate Schools, 2010; 2015). Studies have shown that approximately 40-70% of doctoral students do not finish their degree, and 20% of those who advance to candidacy do not complete the dissertation phase (Lovelace, 2016). Additionally,…

My dissertation, titled "Walking the walk: How Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition doctoral programs prepare their graduate students for intersectional Writing Studies research," responds to recent, repeated calls for a large-scale review of the doctoral programs in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies (de Mueller and Ruiz, 2017;…

'Race applied to human beings is a "political" division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations' (Roberts, 2011, p. x). Foregrounding our racialized histories, we show how our lives "intersect" in a doctoral seminar in Thailand. Combining…