Contemplating Post-Graduate Grief: Re-evaluating Our Relationship to the Future

Abstract

This paper illuminates pedagogical opportunities to support graduate students to envision and prepare for the complex experience of completing an advanced degree such as a doctoral or master’s program. We explore how paradoxical feelings of grief and joy often co-arise upon the crossing of a threshold such as defending a thesis, and how graduands are often ill-equipped to handle these due to a dominant ontology of linear time and phases of progress that culminate in abstract ideals of arrival and completion. These ideals are at odds with the lived experiences of the authors and other graduands. We propose integrating contemplative practices and futures literacy early into graduate programs in order to prepare graduands for the confusing array of feelings often accompanying graduate degree completion. Adopting an ethic of ambivalence allows for conflicting feelings to co-arise and be held simultaneously.