‘Think Twice Before Doing a PhD’: an autoethnography of doctoral affect through songwriting

Doctoral distress is produced through institutional, economic, linguistic, and cultural conditions and is often individualized. This creative autoethnography examines how temporally layered songwriting enabled critical emotional reflexivity on the affective and structural conditions of my doctoral experience as an international student in Canada. The materials comprise a bilingual Mandarin-English song and two temporally separated reflections. Recursive analysis traced three movements of voicing doctoral affect, relocating private inadequacy within institutional conditions, and re-reading voice, vulnerability, and self-protection. Findings show how pressures surrounding language-mediated belonging, funding exclusion, productivity, financial precarity, and family timelines became embodied and internalized as personal inadequacy. Songwriting made these experiences available for recursive interpretation and structural critique. The study positions autoethnographic songwriting as an arts-based mode of knowledge production and calls for doctoral support that connects reflective practice with structural reform.