ORCID

0009-0003-3042-5157

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

7-16-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Communication

Program

Communication

First Advisor

Annis Golden

Second Advisor

Nicolas Bencherki

Committee Members

Patricia Gettings

Keywords

graduate student parents, resilience, Communication Theory of Resilience, ventriloqual analysis, communicative constitution of organizations, Sociomateriality, higher education

Subject Categories

Organizational Communication

Abstract

Graduate education is often organized around norms of uninterrupted productivity, flexibility, and professional availability, making graduate study especially challenging for students who are simultaneously raising children. Although prior research has documented the structural barriers faced by graduate student parents (GSPs), less attention has been paid to how resilience is communicatively enacted within the intersection of academic work and family life. This dissertation examines how GSPs communicatively constitute resilience while navigating work-life disruptions. Drawing on Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR) and the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) perspective, particularly ventriloqual analysis, this study explores how resilience emerges through interactions among human actors and the institutional, material, and symbolic elements participants present as consequential in their everyday lives.

Using a qualitative design, this study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with GSPs enrolled in or recently completing graduate education while raising children. Data were analyzed through a two-stage process combining thematic analysis and ventriloqual analysis. The findings show that resilience was not uniformly available or enacted in the same way across participants. Instead, resilience was differentially constituted through intersectional conditions including immigration status, gendered parenting norms, financial precarity, institutional expectations, and the uneven availability of support. Participants’ accounts further reveal that resilience was communicatively enacted through sociomaterial arrangements such as schedules, digital platforms, childcare infrastructures, institutional policies, relational supports, and religious meaning systems, all of which shaped what forms of coordination, legitimacy, and persistence became possible.

This dissertation makes three primary contributions. First, it demonstrates that resilience among GSPs is best understood as a sociomaterial communicative process rather than solely an interpersonal or individual accomplishment. Second, it shows how intersectional conditions shape access to resilience processes and communicative resources. Third, it extends CTR by introducing the concept of materializing resilience, a transversal layer across CTR’s five processes that highlights how resilience is stabilized through material-discursive arrangements. The study also refines CTR’s process of maintaining communication networks by identifying selective disclosure and strategic concealment as key communicative practices through which GSPs manage the visibility of parenting within academic contexts. Collectively, these findings contribute to resilience communication, organizational communication, and higher education scholarship by offering a more relational, intersectional, and sociomaterial account of how GSPs sustain academic participation under conditions of ongoing strain.

License

This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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