Title:

Full-Bodied Support: How We Embolden Women in Graduate School

Meaghan Dittrich reports on a model for advisors who support graduate students during major life events. Women often call out for recognition of challenges they face while occupying a female body in graduate school. In response, Dittrich offers examples of successful mentorship by producing narratives of her advisor’s support through deaths, weddings, miscarriages, employment, and childbirth, while calling for continued efforts of advocacy and assistance. Beyond the challenges of coursework and teaching, many female graduate students struggle to exist within their bodies in a physical and social framework that denies the importance of corporeality. Whether due to the emotional and physical trials of pregnancy and parenting, the exacerbation of health related problems due to poverty and poor classroom design, the question of whether to disclose our homosexuality to students, our silencing and invisibility in online contexts, or negotiating gender norms in our professional presentation, we silently strive to balance between hiding our perceived physical “excesses” and maintaining our integrity as scholars, educators, role models for students, and complex human beings. Through interviews with female graduate students, this presenter outlines how to make support for them more visible. Please view "presenter notes" in this PowerPoint.

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