Qualifying Differently – A Reflexive Zine
Many people have described the qualifying exam process to me as an important step towards becoming an expert in their field. As a student in an interdisciplinary program, I have wondered about this so-called ‘field’ and the goal of ‘expert’ knowledge. Also, beyond broad suggestions to make a reading schedule, take notes, and organize citations, reflections on the everyday embodied, material, affective, and relational aspects of the process have been largely absent in these descriptions. In an effort to push back against the idea of expert knowledge, and to illuminate the intimate and relational details of my experience preparing for my qualifying exam I created Qualifying Differently: A Reflexive Zine.
As informal, often self-published, mini magazines, zines have been used to provide feminist and other critical commentary, disrupt dominant narratives, and create space for sharing non-linear, messy stories and ideas (Gray et al. 2021; Bagelman and Bagelman 2016; Creasap 2014). The constructed nature of zines provides an important source of knowledge, combining visual and textual elements to convey multiple realities at once (Gray et al. 2021; Osei Kofi 2013). Additionally, feminist scholars have used zines to resist neoliberal expectations of certain types of productivity and specific research outputs (Bagelman and Bagelman 2016; Creasap 2014). Emily Gray and colleagues (2021) argue that zines can challenge “the academic personhood most valued by the neoliberal university” (p. 9). Thus, I suggest that as a visual art and story-based method, as well as feminist praxis, zines have radical potential for rethinking the qualifying exam process.
Through this reflexive zine, I aim to provide a commentary on doing qualifying exams differently. Using both image and text, I attempt to make visible the various ‘things’ (both human and non-human) that have sustained me as I prepared for my qualifying exams: my dogs and their quiet comfort, my research team and our weekly check-ins, my spouse and his daily acts of care, my vegetable gardens and the care they need from and give to me, to name a few. I also try to capture the way certain ideas from the literature affected me and showed up in my practice. Additionally, I reflect on the material and embodied dimensions of my qualifying exam process, like the chair that broke underneath me after many long days at my desk, or the nights spent “reading” in my dreams.
To create Qualifying Differently, I kept reflexive notes and sketches as I prepared for my QEs. These reflections included scribbled comments in my notebooks and questions posed in the margins of articles and book chapters. They also included ideas dictated into my phone late in the evening or after a walk in the woods and doodles sketched on my iPad. Towards the end of my preparation, I developed a story board to map my ideas and the moments I wanted to share in my zine. I then collected and organized different digital materials like quotations, drawings, and photographs. Over the course of three weeks, I worked to weave these ideas and materials together, and created a final digitized zine.
As a practice-based method, zine-making allowed me to incorporate creative elements such as art and stories into my QE process. Doing so required that I slow-down while I gathered my ideas and materials and took time to imagine how I could visually convey my thoughts or write in a way that accounted for my emotional and embodied experiences. The slowness and creativity embedded in this method created the time and space I needed to grapple with the less tangible elements of preparing for my qualifying exams, as well as a process for doing so.
My experience creating a zine was an ongoing process of revision. In the context of their arts-based digital storytelling research, Carla Rice and Ingrid Mündel (2018) pay particular attention to the process of revision, which they define as “revisiting, rethinking, and reworking” (p. 225). For my zine, this included rewriting and removing certain stories, cropping and editing photos, and repositioning and resizing drawings. Although I created and revised my zine ‘alone’ in my office, this was an emergent and relational process (Sanders-Bustle 2020; Leavy 2020). For example, during the Community Conversation Troubling Care a panelist described zine-making as an act of care for the community. Her description encouraged me to understand zine-making as an act of care for future graduate students preparing for their exams, which influenced the stories I shared. Relationships also shaped the visual and textual components of the zine in many ways. For instance, I used software recommended by a friend, created artwork influenced by the style of different artists, (re)used photographs taken by others and (re)told stories developed in conversation with my friends and family. Additionally, as I was making and revising my zine based on encounters with others, I was actively shaping how I wished to portray the QE process and my experiences of it, all the while shaping the way I understood myself and who I was becoming as an academic in the process.
Like zine-making, preparing for my exams has been a relational process. Not only did relationships contribute to the development and revision of my proposal – and knowledge more broadly – they sustained me physically, mentally, and emotionally while I prepared for my exams. As detailed in my zine, the care provided through many human-and-non-human relationships has been crucial to this process. Importantly, this process also influenced how I understand relationships both in and outside of academia. For example, literature I read encouraged me to think about community care and interdependence in a new way and work to flatten hierarchies in teams, classrooms, and research relationships. In this way, I found that foregrounding the relational dimensions of qualifying exams, highlights the important role relationships have in the development of both knowledge and academic subjectivities.
Understanding qualifying exams as a relational practice of revision can challenge traditional understandings of what doctoral exams should look like, feel like, and do. It can make us consider how we – as students and those constructing graduate programs – might build collaboration into the qualifying exam process. For example, what would it look like to co-create a material list or proposal with those beyond our advisory committees? Such an understanding can also raise questions about how qualifying exams could be better designed to trouble the artificial divide between theory and practice. Patricia Leavy (2020) encourages those evaluating ABR to ask, “what is this piece of art good for” rather than asking, “is this a good piece of art” (p. 30). This focus on usefulness is reiterated by many critical arts-based researchers (e.g., McNiff 2018; Barone 2012) who encourage researchers engaging in self-reflexive arts-based projects – which I suggest includes a doctoral student making a zine about her qualifying exam process – to carefully consider the connection of their experiences to broader social issues. It is my hope that this zine has been “good for” something. I hope that, as it illuminates the iterative, embodied, emotional, and relational elements of my qualifying exam process, it pushes back against narratives of expert knowledge and encourages other ways of thinking about and preparing for qualifying exams, which account for our interdependence as scholars and the storied nature of knowledge.
This zine is my act of care for future doctoral students preparing for their qualifying exams.
Click below to download a free copy of Qualifying Differently
References
Bagelman, C. C., & Bagelman, J. (2016). Zines: Crafting change and repurposing the neoliberal university. Acme, 15(2), 365-392.
Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage.
Creasap, K. (2014). Zine-making as feminist pedagogy. Feminist Teacher, 24(3), 155-168.
Gray, E. M., Pollitt, J., & Blaise, M. (2021). Between activism and academia: zine-making as a feminist response to COVID-19. Gender and Education, 1-19.
Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford Publications.
Rice, C., & Mündel, I. (2018). Story-making as methodology: Disrupting dominant stories through multimedia storytelling. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 55(2), 211231.
Sanders-Bustle, L. (2020). Social practice as arts-based methodology: Exploring participation, multiplicity, and collective action as elements of inquiry. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 5(1), 47-70.
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