Writing a Doctoral Thesis in a Non-Western Voice

Abstract

My Ph.D. thesis on Tibetan Buddhism and feminism uses autoethnographic performative writing to invoke a non-Western voice that challenges colonialities of knowledge production. Studying at the time as an international doctoral student in Australia, I chose to focus my thesis on my experience as a Bangladeshi female writing in an academic context that is predominately influenced by the hegemony of Western knowledge. By waging epistemic disobedience through performative writing, I created a space for writing a doctoral thesis with a non-Western voice. Nonetheless through my journey, I encountered struggles and addressed questions of legitimacy. Despite this, I endured. In this chapter, I aim to unpack my strategies and challenges, offering a fresh perspective on what it is like to be a non-Western doctoral student enacting academic resistance. In autoethnography, researchers analyze their own experiences to address the main themes of their research (Ellis et al., 2011). Autoethnographers work to connect personal experience to wider political and cultural contexts. Many autoethnographers have used these tools to enable the representation of the voices, languages, and narratives of others, especially the marginalized and the subaltern, who do not have the opportunity to speak due to the authority and surveillance of hegemonic power structures within the academy (Holt, 2003; Lincoln & Denzin, 2003). I am an author who builds on and extends this body of work. In my Ph.D. thesis, I used autoethnographic methods to reflect upon my life journey as a Bangladeshi female negotiating Tibetan Buddhist practice and feminist values in an in-between space of cultures, religion, and identity. I undertook this project due to the lack of autoethnographic voices of women of color with regard to understanding the relationship between Tibetan Buddhism and feminism in women’s lives, particularly for women across different cultures and religions who came to know Tibetan Buddhist practice by choice, not by birth or family relationships. In this chapter, I describe what happened when I started to write autoethnographically for my doctoral thesis. I began to