“It’s About Channelling that Anger, Isn’t It?” Postgraduate Researcher Resistance through Collaboration and Care

Postgraduate researchers are expected to work independently to create new knowledge, retaining productivity and internalised motivation for the entirety of their PhD research. However, COVID-19 undermined our ability to progress in this typical manner, as the pandemic created an iterative lockdown process within the UK, which increased levels of isolation and decreased levels of institutional support for PhD researchers.

Despite these challenges, many individuals and groups of PhD researchers resisted; creating their own opportunities to research, reconciling the tensions between their essential role as knowledge producers against their invisibility as individuals in the neoliberal university system. Our own efforts of resistance came as we extended a funding body call to ‘evidence’ the impact of the pandemic on our studies by creating an interdisciplinary group of four UK-based female postgraduate researchers, from various marginalised identities (e.g. disability, age, class, race). We spent the UK-lockdowns unpacking our otherwise individual experiences through a collective lens. These shared responses were collated and understood through the multivocal method of feminist collaborative auto-ethnography (FCAE).In this paper, we (re)immerse ourselves both situationally and critically into the pool of data created in our original FCAE project to co-construct narratives outlining collaborative efforts of resistance against Higher Education’s neglect for postgraduate researchers during the pandemic and beyond. We also recognise and actively raise the efforts of resistance of other postgraduate researchers, by citing our peers as core research literature. By publishing and recognising, identifying, and integrating this body of work, we visiblise our value as researchers.