Countering Isolation and Toxic Competition through Community-Building: The Value of Writing Accountability Circles for PhD Students

Writing Accountability Groups are lauded for supporting junior faculty in developing productive writing habits and attaining writing goals during a high-pressure phase in academic pursuits (Skarupski & Foucher, 2018). Little scholarship focuses on the value of such groups for doctoral students and the existing literature places emphasis on the productive nature of these groups (Hutton Sharp, 2015; Thorpe et al., 2020). While valid aims, the creation of a PhD student-led Writing Accountability Circle challenged the dehumanizing aspects of the White supremacist educational model including individualism, competitiveness, productivity, scarcity, and perfectionism (Jones & Okun, 2001). For over two years, we came together bi-weekly across regions and time zones to maintain a sacred space. This chosen community helped (and continues to help) us create and maintain connection, energized momentum with our academic pursuits, offered a space for collaborative brainstorming on projects and endeavors, and became a brave space in which we could share diverse perspectives within our full humanity. The mental strain of graduate education on students is well documented (Evans et al., 2018). The additional pressures of a global pandemic, political upheaval, murders at the hands of law enforcement, and overt bigotry in our communities made this space that much more critical. During this period of increased isolation and fear-based rhetoric, this group became a lifeline for many of us to stay with the work and maintain mental wellness. Through an autoethnographic lens, we offer our reflections as a diverse group sharing a common space. We will share our approach to group creation, development, and maintenance, as well as the “meeting� scaffolding we created. We hope this reflective space will allow participants to examine how to meet their respective needs along their own journey by creating connection, while challenging toxic tenets of neoliberal educational approaches.