Braiding Our (In)Visibility: Native Women Navigating the Doctoral Process through Social Media

Abstract

Native doctoral students are a severely underrepresented group in higher education with stagnating enrollment trends over the last 30 years when compared to other racial/ethnic groups. For Native women doctoral students specifically, they represent only 0.9% (n=119) in 2002-03 (DeVoy, Darling- Churchill, & Snyder, 2008). Connected to the lack of representation at a doctoral level, their unique intersectional experiences are largely ignored in research. Using (in)visibility, cultural integrity, and counter-storytelling, this Indigenous qualitative (e.g., sharing circles) study explores three Native women doctoral students’ documented lived experiences via social media as they navigated through the doctoral and dissertation writing process. Through scholarly personal narrative analyses of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts and virtual sharing circles, early career Native scholars discuss managing visibility, maintaining cultural integrity, and using social media as a means for strengthening relationships and empowering resistance to oppressive university structures. While social media was important in helping Native women doctoral students, institutions must incorporate Native culture and perspectives when seeking ways to advance Native doctoral degree recipients.

Keywords

• Native
• Native peoples
• higher education
• graduate students
• race
• ethnicity