Hidden Violence and Everyday Negotiation: An Autoethnography of Neoliberal Precarity in Graduate Life

Universities worldwide increasingly prioritize quantifiable outputs—publication counts, citation metrics, global rankings—as measures of academic success. This neoliberal turn has profoundly affected graduate students, who navigate institutional pressures while managing precarious labor conditions and uncertain futures. Yet scholarship on neoliberal academia rarely centers graduate students’ lived experiences, particularly those of international students caught between multiple national academic systems. By adopting an autoethnographic approach, this article examines how neoliberal academic structures produce hidden violence—structural forces operating through normalized practices that render systematic harm invisible—in the life of a Korean PhD student in urban planning at a U.S. university. Drawing on three semesters of systematic reflexive analysis, I document three strategies of academic survival: publishing in fast open-access journals, performing the role of “good student,” and strategically selecting research topics for career advancement. These practices, while enabling survival, reveal deeper contradictions between aspirations for meaningful scholarship and institutional demands for measurable outputs. This hidden violence produces shame experienced as personal inadequacy but structured by systemic conditions—a dynamic intensified for international students navigating between Korean and American academic systems simultaneously. I argue that resistance to neoliberal academia manifests not only in overt refusal but also in everyday negotiations, reframings, and collective reimaginings of what scholarship can be. The article concludes by proposing autoethnography itself as a form of resistance—one that exposes the emotional costs of academic metrics while building toward alternative frameworks of knowledge production.