Funders are increasingly requiring international collaboration for research projects and such projects add to the reputation, rankings and research gravitas of institutions and individual researchers alike. The power asymmetries in global knowledge production means that international research collaboration comes with a range of taken-for-granted and unquestioned rules and rituals. These have become naturalized in international research collaboration and shape researcher identity, development and career progression. In this paper, we operationalize the term 'doxa' as a methodological tool through a critical collaborative autoethnography to examine how researchers negotiate the opportunities, tensions, and power struggles emerging from their varying possession of symbolic capital and (dis)positions in a globalized research landscape. In doing so, the paper considers how global power structures play out in individuals' lives and identities, and suggest that international research collaboration contributes to the reproduction of inequalities in the highly competitive and unequal field of academic research.