Coming to Strange Conclusions: An Autoethnography About Failure in a First Year Graduate Level Theory Course

Abstract

Current research addressing and predicting graduate student success tends to reduce students to a list of qualities, skills, and personality traits, and to locate the capacity for success in the individual student. Few researchers locate graduate student success in external structural, psychological, or spiritual conditions, and fewer still consider the role that different forms of failure play in shaping the identity formation and learning experiences of new graduate students. This analytic autoethnographic reflection will consider the fundamental role that failure, rather than success, has played in my own experience of, in one ethnographer’s words, “be(com)ing academic”, in a first-year graduate-level theory course. Failing to be(come) a graduate student and failing to be(come) theoretical are interrelated, because this particular context—a first-year theory course—has had the effect of conflating and confusing these experiences. Specifically, I address instances of having the wrong attitude, (un)critical thinking, procrastination, and confusion that occur in my own posts in online seminar discussion forums, within the context of larger social phenomena. I explore how failure in graduate school can alternately be understood as located in the individual student and in larger systems and conditions, using an interdisciplinary lens, without drawing decisive conclusions or relinquishing my sense of uncertainty.

Keywords: graduate school, graduate student, theory, failure, autoethnography