Power-conscious ecosystems: understanding how power dynamics in US doctoral advising shape students’ experiences

Doctoral advising serves a pivotal role in graduate education but is too often rooted in power inequities that have adverse impacts. In this narrative inquiry study, we examined how 28 doctoral students in STEM fields navigated power in their advising relationships through the context of their decision to switch advisors. We found that Ph.D. students encountered several forms of power in their advising relationships aligned with those proposed by Guerrero et al. ( 2020 ): resource-based power, enabling or disabling power, perceptual power, relational power, and power as prerogative. Our analysis illuminates how power is fueled by exo- and macro-level factors but is carried out on the meso- and micro-levels, often to the detriment of Ph.D. students. We also found that doctoral students exerted their own agency and power where possible, even in the face of severe power differentials and abuses. Our findings suggest that STEM departments engaged in doctoral education should create objective criteria for student feedback, offer more regular benchmarks and assessments for feedback, and decouple financial support from the advising relationship.