Invisible students: The lived experiences of international PhD students who are mothers of dependent children

Abstract

Academic women have long asserted that the university community ignores the issues they face when combining their studies with work commitments and maternal responsibilities. Recent studies in this field indicate women encounter many obstacles when pursuing an academic journey. These challenges encompass the struggles involved with fulfilling a number of roles – particularly those created by motherhood. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little research into how international PhD student-mothers manage to reconcile the tensions between their studies and the demands of their personal lives. Earlier literature has not focussed on the challenges faced by international PhD student-mothers when they are attempting to integrate into a new society and a different culture while studying and/or working and looking after their children. This study provides a feminist perspective to investigate the barriers and challenges international PhD student-mothers face when seeking to combine PhD study with their mothering responsibilities in a New Zealand context. This research project involved semi-structured interviews with 17 international PhD student-mothers from nine different countries studying at a leading New Zealand university. The interviews reveal their emotions involved in being international PhD-mothers, their personal learning and mothering challenges, as well as how they forged a sense of belonging within a neoliberal university environment. The thematic analysis of the interviews provides insight into not only the tensions which are a daily reality for international PhD student-mothers’ but also the joy and motivation of them. This study analyses the specific and distinctive hurdles faced by PhD-mothers who are also international students, and who have to determine how to construct personal and intimate relationships, and provide effective, quality childcare. These women described the requirement to abide by the implicit norms of “mothering” within a New Zealand context which, at times, contradicted their own cultural norms as well as meeting the tacit expectations of the academy. The issues they face stem from the academic settings, emotional anguish, an absence of extended family help, the stress of coming to terms with new cultural norms, visa restrictions and motherhood ideologies. Although the number of solutions to these problems is quite limited, help comes from family members, supervisors' support, peer support and the women's own resilient characters. This thesis presents data which offers an understanding of these women's experiences of integrating studying and motherhood away from their home country in a neoliberal university. The participants describe several tensions that include financial hardship, the gap between expectations and reality, the gap between the support structures of the university and the PhD-mothers' actual needs, and most significantly – the societal pressure to be a perfect mother as well as the ideal scholar.