Surviving the PhD: Care, Faith, and the Cost of Academic Belonging

This paper examines how doctoral study is lived and endured by mothering scholars navigating race, migration, and faith within contemporary higher education. It argues that doctoral education, commonly framed as an intellectual and professional trajectory, unfolds for many women as a deeply embodied, relational, and care-saturated process. Within this context, instead of functioning as an external pressure or background condition, care operates as a structuring force that shapes writing practices, emotional capacity, scholarly identity, and a sense of belonging. The academic subject imagined as autonomous, secular, and disembodied becomes increasingly untenable when confronted with the everyday realities of doctoral motherhood.



Drawing on feminist ethics of care (Ahmed, 2017) and decolonial relational epistemologies (Lugones, 2010; Mountz et al., 2015), the paper conceptualises caregiving as both an epistemic condition and a form of resistance. Care is approached as a mode of knowing that reveals how institutional structures continue to privilege uninterrupted productivity, individualised resilience, and temporal availability, while rendering relational labour invisible (Lynch, 2010; Bhopal, 2022). For mothering scholars, particularly those positioned within racialised and migratory contexts, academic life becomes organised around an ongoing negotiation between institutional expectations and the moral, emotional, and logistical responsibilities of care.



The paper critically interrogates the persistent ideal of work–life balance in academia. It demonstrates how balance operates less as an attainable condition and more as a disciplinary narrative that individualises structural failure. Experiences of parenting alongside doctoral study, including fragmented working hours, missed religious observances, and perpetual academic availability, reveal how balance functions as performance. The expectation of full presence coexists with minimal institutional reciprocity, reinforcing a masculine, secular, and able-bodied archetype of the scholar (Acker & Armenti, 2004). For women navigating caregiving and migration, balance becomes a source of guilt and perceived inadequacy, sustained through neoliberal discourses of time management and self-responsibilities (Gill, 2009).



Through a duo auto-ethnographic longitudinal study, this paper presents the traces of the cumulative costs of care through everyday academic losses: unread literature, abandoned conferences, constrained research networks, and the steady erosion of professional visibility. These experiences exceed the framing of freely made choices and reflect the operation of structural constraints, including unaffordable childcare, restrictive immigration regimes, and academic calendars misaligned with family life (Mountz et al., 2015; Pereira, 2016). The findings illustrate how institutional temporalities remain grounded in gendered and racialised assumptions about who can afford uninterrupted scholarly time. Care becomes displaced into the private sphere, while academic success continues to rely on invisible relational labour.



Attention is also given to how faith and cultural identity introduce additional layers of tension. For Muslim mothering scholars situated within secular academic spaces, everyday practices of devotion, including activism, community service, acts of worship, and organising work around religious rhythms, often become read as disruptions to academic normativity and interpreted as indicators of diminished commitment (Ahmed, 2012). These embodied practices remain largely unaccommodated within institutional cultures that privilege whiteness, individualism, and rational detachment (Essed, 2009). This positioning produces a form of compounded marginality, shaped through gendered, racialised, and spiritual exclusions. Faith operates simultaneously as a source of strength and a site of epistemic tension, revealing how dominant academic norms continue to delimit which identities are recognised as legitimate bearers of knowledge.



The paper concludes by examining how doctoral motherhood reshapes subjectivity through loneliness, endurance, and ethical resistance. Loneliness emerges as layered and structural, combining academic isolation with migratory dislocation and the absence of extended kin networks (Reay, 2003; Clegg, 2008). Strength becomes reframed as a moral and political orientation grounded in care labour and sustained through cultural and spiritual commitments that refuse assimilation into neoliberal academic ideals (Gill & Orgad, 2018). These forms of endurance challenge celebratory narratives of resilience and overwork, offering instead a critique of institutional systems that normalise exhaustion while denying relational dependency.



Overall, the paper argues that academic motherhood, constitutes a critical standpoint for exposing how higher education continues to rely on invisible care while denying its epistemic significance. Care, faith, and survival emerge as central to how knowledge is produced, contested, and sustained within academic life. The analysis calls for a shift from individualised narratives of adjustment towards structural accountability, situating academic motherhood as a key site for rethinking academic value, belonging, and epistemic justice.

References

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