2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this WIP research paper is to explore the non-linear, affective, and identity-laden dimensions of the doctoral milestone experience for a queer, first-generation, international student. This work challenges the normalized violence embedded in academic milestones, violence enacted through expectations of objectivity, productivity, and conformity that often silence emotional labor, grief, and cultural displacement.

Guided by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this ongoing autoethnography reframes the doctoral milestone not as a discrete evaluative checkpoint but as a dynamic, entangled process of becoming. Drawing on personal journals, visual collages, and peer dialogues, this study traces how ruptures, moments of disorientation, loss, and resistance, generate new connections between identity, belonging, and intellectual growth.

Preliminary findings are presented in a visual rhizomatic map, a collage-based representation that layers text, imagery, and affect to illustrate the tangled interrelations among grief, growth, and becoming. This visual form serves not as an illustration but as an analytic product, an embodied articulation of how marginalized scholars navigate and reimagine academic spaces structured by ableist and cisheteropatriarchal norms.
Early reflections suggest that grief operates as both rupture and catalyst for scholarly transformation, unsettling conventional narratives of merit and success. By surfacing these embodied tensions, this work seeks to humanize the doctoral process and interrogate the epistemic violence inherent in traditional academic rituals. Future stages of this research will extend this visual and narrative analysis through continued journaling and collaborative interpretation, exploring how grief-informed and queer methodologies can foster institutional compassion and reimagine what counts as rigor in engineering education research.

Keywords: autoethnography, rhizome, grief, doctoral education, queer methodology, visual methods