The critical methodology of my academic survival: a personal narrative autoethnography

Abstract

This article profiles my journey to critical methodologies as a multiply minoritized doctoral student in counselor education. I structured this personal narrative autoethnography using critical in-depth phenomenological interviewing’s autobiographical procedures and two-cycle coding and data reduction. One purpose of critical hermeneutics is “to explore hidden power imbalances and challenge the status quo” and name pseudo-transcendental structures that constrain meaning making and interpretation in order to make the world better. I identify implications for more inclusive and identity-conscious doctoral counselor education by examining my own lived experiences with institutionally mediated disjuncture and disillusionment. To make sense of my narrative, I rely on the scholarship of doctoral attrition among multiply minoritized doctoral students, a Black feminist neurodivergent nonbinary epistemology, and critical methodological theory. These helped not only illuminate and examine the structural barriers I faced but also articulate how critical methodologies provided a means to save my institutional life.