Invisible Labor,Transgressive Service: A Visual Duoethnography Project on Graduate Student Peer Mentorship

Abstract

Background:

Graduate students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, often battle isolation and exclusion within the academy, causing feelings of unbelonging. Although research often highlights the importance of mentorship as a model for combating this, such relational labor and collective practice by students often remain invisible, undervalued, and uncompensated by institutions. Through a community as rebellion framework, this study frames graduate student peer mentorship and connection as a critical site of resistance and a potential site of liberation.

Focus of Study:

This paper reframes graduate student peer mentorship through “invisible labor” and “transgressive service”: collective, uncompensated acts of care that resist the neoliberal university’s norms of individualism, productivity, and hierarchy. We ask what this labor looks like in daily practice and how it might be recognized as central to sustaining academic communities. This method of analysis is central to our process of visual duoethnography and reflects our commitment to community as rebellion, critical mentoring, and transgressing the academy, which call for decolonial, reciprocal, and transformative engagements in research and mentorship.

Research Design:

This work employs visual duoethnography, combining the use of photography and dialogic co-analysis by documenting everyday life in the academy to make visible the unseen micro-practices of graduate student labor. Over the duration of six weeks, we collected 58 photographs and journal entries, which led to a practice of collaging that captured how graduate students show up to support each other and resist colonial logics in the university.

Conclusions:

Our findings illuminate three interwoven practices (1) sustaining through nourishment and wellness, (2) circulating knowledge: resource curation, and (3) the politics of showing up: celebration, ritual, and recognition—that together resist the erasure of graduate students’ communal labor. By reimagining service and mentorship as collective, decolonial practice, we argue for institutional recognition of this labor and for graduate students’ role in co-creating more liberatory academic spaces. We conclude by inviting graduate students and others engaged in this type of labor in the academy to contribute photographs, stories, and other artifacts to an expanding community archive of invisible labor, extending the project beyond our own duoethnography and toward a collective record of resistance and care.