Date of Award
6-11-2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Educational Leadership
First Advisor
Katherine Cho
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to understand the socialization experiences of international women students from the Global South, pursuing doctoral degrees in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) in the U.S. PWIs have a long history of marginalizing systems of knowledge (epistemology) of racialized populations while propagating for and universalizing the White, Eurocentric worldviews in curriculum and pedagogical practices. As a result, this exacerbates the marginalization, isolation, and exclusion of the epistemic capitals and worldviews of racialized students. Two research questions guided this qualitative study: 1) How do international women students from the Global South experience doctoral socialization in PWIs in the U.S.? 2) How do their experiences inform their agency and academic persistence? By focusing on the learning experiences of women students enrolled in doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences fields, the study aimed to understand whether and to what extent these experiences were shaped by epistemic injustice and its facets of epistemic marginalization, exclusion, and violence. The study was also interested in understanding how women students from the Global South enact their agency to resist and push back against those forms of epistemic injustice perpetuated and deeply rooted in PWIs in the U.S. In doing so, the study adopted portraiture and pláticas as both rooted in Chicana Feminist epistemology: Portraiture as a humanizing methodology that informs the methodological design of the study and the pláticas as the main method of data collection. The findings of the study showcase how epistemic injustice manifests itself in doctoral education as a repressive apparatus of PWIs in the U.S., leading to worsening experiences of epistemic neglect, erasure, and marginalization for women doctoral students from the Global South. The study concludes by offering some viable recommendations for campus policy, classroom practice of pedagogy and curriculum, and research. The recommendations hope to make doctoral socialization, and the landscape of higher education at large, more globally conscious and culturally nuanced and relevant for an improved learning experience for international women students from the Global South in the U.S.
Recommended Citation
Abdelghaffar, Alaa Adel Elsayed, "Epistemic Injustice: A Portraiture of Doctoral Socialization" (2025). Dissertations. 4182.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/4182
