This paper probably takes the prize for “Longest time between study design and publication” – a whopping THIRTEEN years! 😁 Nevertheless, the issues we investigated still remain crucial, despite a “minor” event like a global pandemic happening in the meantime, and perhaps a key reason I’m excited to see it in print is because it’s finally out there! That, and the amazing collaboration with Wayne State Department of Communication alum Kelsey Mesmer (Asst. Professor at St. Louis University) and Patrice M. Buzzanell. 🩷
The project began in 2012, when Patrice and I won a small grant from the National Communication Association to study how Communication graduate students engaged with the various stressors and challenges of graduate school. We interviewed 50 incredible participants, who were MA and PhD students in a variety of Communication programs nationwide. Unfortunately, after collecting the data, we hit a very practical snag: it was time for me to analyze and write up my dissertation, which was on a very different topic! Over the next few years, as I sought to publish research around sustainability and environmental organizing, this project fell by the wayside. Every 6 months or so, Patrice and I would talk about how we really should go back to the data, and sometimes we made some headway, but our work was always interrupted.
Then, I had the pleasure of teaching Kelsey in my communication theory graduate class, and she wrote an excellent paper based on some of the data we had collected. Her involvement was the catalyst we needed to go back to the stories from Communication graduate students we had gathered – some appalling, some heartbreaking, but all of them absolutely inspiring – and systematically analyzed them to better understand what was happening. Just when we thought we were on a roll – an invitation to “revise and resubmit” from a reputable journal – the pandemic hit and, as our lives were up-ended, the manuscript took a back-seat again. We missed the R&R deadline, and despondency set in. In late 2022 (or was it early 2023?), at Patrice’s urging, we took up the mantle again, and Kelsey then led our team to develop a new manuscript that we submitted to the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Over the next year or so, we went back and forth through our many versions of the codebook and the data files, had several Zoom meetings, shared stories from our own lives and comforted each other, until we finally received the incredible news that our paper had been accepted.
I’m sharing this perhaps too-long background story, both because I am so grateful to my incredible coauthors for their persistence and resilience, and because it’s a story of how sometimes those long-shelved projects do come out of the wood-work and make an important point. Doing research is a long and complicated process, sometimes tedious and even de-spiriting, especially when you’re juggling teaching and service duties as well, and there have certainly been times in the last 13 years that I thought about abandoning this project altogether. I’m glad that Kelsey and Patrice wouldn’t let us do that, though, and they helped me regain my motivation and creativity for this project, so that it ended up being a really great paper. (No, I’m not in the least biased!)
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it, and find these stories as captivating as we did. Here is a link for a free copy, and below is the paper abstract.
Given intensified calls to attend to mental health in academia, we sought to understand how graduate students in the communication discipline anticipate, respond to, and resist institutional stressors via their resilience processes. Drawing on interviews with 50 graduate students, we examined how graduate students’ resilience communication processes enacted adaptive-transformative possibilities for resistance across micro, meso, and macro organizational levels in higher education. Our findings show how participants’ resilience processes, in response to co-occurring stressors of academic norms, institutional restraints, and experiences of marginalization, aligned with specific modes of resistance (viz., individual infrapolitics, insubordination, collective infrapolitics, insurrection). Ultimately, we extend theorizing on resilience to illuminate its intersections with resistance and offer practical interventions to build both individual and collective resilience among graduate students in higher education.
Rahul Mitra 