Chapter 22: Intersectionalities of Advisors and Advisees: A Dialogic Parsing of Politics and Processes for Mid-Career Doctoral Students

For decades, mid-career professionals have dominated graduate program enrollments. Still, they are described as non-traditional students. Upon entry to graduate school, mid-career professionals have established reputations and well-developed, multiple social roles as do their faculty and advisors. The tangle of mid-life identities, experiences, and roles may collide in the classroom and during one-to-one advising. In this chapter, a graduate student and a professor engage a disruptive and reflective dialogue about their own intersectionalities, identities, and the conflicts, which arise in the doctoral program process. The dialogue was transcribed and submitted to a double-round coding process, exposing the tensions in new doctoral students’ aspirations, expectations, and program design. Among these tensions, purposeful advising includes disruption of student identity, expectations, and notions of rigor. The challenge for advisors surrounds the question of how much intervention may be necessary in expanding students’ narrow vision of their career trajectories to the broader cognitive and academic horizons associated with an earned doctorate.