Reclaiming Agency, Navigating Constraint: Experiences of PhD Students of Color on the Academic Job Market at the Height of COVID-19

We studied how racially minoritized PhD students reclaimed their power and agency when navigating the academic job market during the onset of COVID-19 and higher education’s responses to calls for racial justice. Guided by the theories of community cultural wealth and graduate student agency, we analyzed focus group data from 30 racially minoritized PhD students. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education’s “racial reckoning” created a situation in which racially minoritized PhD students experienced a racialized neoliberal logic, signaling that they had to detach themselves from the realities of COVID-19 and operate with a business-as-usual mentality. However, COVID-19 shifted the participants’ priorities and sensemaking about what was and was not negotiable regarding their family members’ well-being, mental health and timeline toward degree completion, and applying for and accepting faculty jobs. Our findings suggest that administrators and faculty need to acknowledge and consider more the cultural strengths of racially minoritized PhD students in their recruitment and hiring decisions.