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This manuscript takes the form of a social fiction doctoral application that refuses pretense. Framed as an admissions packet, it blends autoethnography, poetry, and political critique to confront the growing legislative assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education. These assaults, though cloaked in new rhetoric, extend a long-standing tradition: the erasure of marginalized epistemologies within doctoral education. Structured as a hybrid dossier, complete with reflective essays, imagined recommendations, and lyrical interludes, the manuscript examines how doctoral programs across varied contexts are either resisting or reinforcing this erasure. Positioned within a comparative framework, it explores how global and national pressures shape institutional responses to anti-DEI mandates and what these tensions reveal about the trajectory of doctoral education. Ultimately, the manuscript challenges the academy to confront its complicity in silencing dissent and to reimagine doctoral study as a crucible for epistemic justice, where knowledge is not policed but pluralized.
1. Framing the Landscape: Anti-DEI Legislation and Doctoral Education
American higher education is not evolving; it is being reengineered to erase histories, suppress testimony, and limit epistemic freedom. States across the country have passed or are considering legislation that targets diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and what opponents label “WOKE” ideology. By 2024, twelve states had signed such measures into law. This sweeping movement represents more than political theater. It functions, as Davis (2024) argues, to “effectively discourage [institutions] from offering and advancing higher learning responsive to its marginalized students, faculty, and staff” (p. 3). Within graduate education, especially doctoral training, this movement undermines the foundational commitments to inquiry, justice, and intellectual plurality.
Yet this erasure is not new. The exclusionary architecture of doctoral education predates these legislative assaults by over a century. As Posselt (2016) documents, the American doctoral system was built on gatekeeping mechanisms, from the GRE’s origins in eugenic science to the apprenticeship model that reproduced white, male intellectual lineages. What Wilder (2013) calls “the entanglement of the academy and slavery” established universities as sites where knowledge production was inseparable from racial domination. The current anti-DEI movement, then, represents not a rupture but an intensification, a return to explicitly exclusionary logics that had been challenged but never dismantled. As Bell (1980) theorized through interest convergence, moments of apparent progress in higher education often give way to retrenchment when inclusion threatens established hierarchies.
This pattern extends beyond U.S. borders. While American anti-DEI legislation has garnered the most attention, similar ideological movements have emerged globally. In the UK, the government’s attacks on “decolonizing the curriculum” mirror U.S. rhetoric about CRT (Doharty et al., 2021; Fazackerley, 2021; Mirza, 2018). Brazil’s dismantling of affirmative action under Bolsonaro and Hungary’s banning of gender studies programs reflect coordinated transnational efforts to police epistemic boundaries (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017; Oppenheim, 2018; Pető, 2021). Yet countries like South Africa and New Zealand have responded differently, with universities actively pursuing decolonial frameworks despite political pressure (Mbembe, 2016). These divergent responses reveal that the assault on epistemic plurality is neither inevitable nor insurmountable; it is a choice, politically orchestrated and institutionally enacted.
Yet even within this landscape of erasure, resistance persists. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have largely refused to comply with anti-DEI mandates, drawing on their foundational mission to educate those the mainstream academy excluded (Allen & Jewell, 2002). Tribal colleges continue to center Indigenous epistemologies despite state pressure, understanding that their survival has always required resistance to settler knowledge systems (Brayboy, 2005). Some faculty at public institutions have formed underground networks, sharing banned texts through encrypted channels and holding unofficial reading groups in their homes. Policies may regulate syllabi; they cannot regulate kitchens, the off-ledger spaces where study persists. These acts of refusal, quiet, costly, and often invisible, suggest that epistemic erasure, while systematic, is never complete.
Critical legal scholars and Black Studies intellectuals have long recognized this dynamic. As Matsuda (1987) argued, “looking to the bottom,” centering the knowledge of those most marginalized, reveals how law functions as a tool of subordination disguised as neutrality. Harris (1993) theorized whiteness as property, showing how educational credentials serve as forms of racialized capital that law protects. From Indigenous studies, Tuck and Yang (2012) warn against the “metaphorization” of decolonization, insisting that epistemic justice requires material redistribution, not merely curricular inclusion. These frameworks expose anti-DEI legislation as part of what Mills (1997) calls the “epistemology of ignorance,” a systematic production of unknowing that maintains racial hierarchies through enforced forgetting.The timing of this special issue is significant. Doctoral programs are navigating not just legislative restrictions, but existential questions: Can they remain sites of critical knowledge production amid expanding prohibitions? Can they claim to cultivate scholars while discouraging specific ways of knowing? As McGowan et al. (2025) observe, “The challenge lies not only in defending DEI efforts but also in reimagining it to remain effective and resilient in politically volatile times” (p. 1). Smith and Gasman’s (2025) analysis of the University of Alabama’s navigation of state DEI bans exemplifies how institutional compliance becomes a form of erasure—not through outright resistance or wholesale capitulation, but through strategic reframing that makes equity work legible under conditions designed to eliminate it.
This literature review surveys recent work on anti-DEI, anti-CRT, and anti-WOKE policy to locate the present manuscript within an unfolding conversation. However, it also acknowledges the limitations of this discourse, particularly its tendency to treat these policies as isolated flashpoints rather than expressions of a broader project of epistemic regulation. What Wynter (2003) calls the “overrepresentation of Man” in Western knowledge systems, the centering of a particular racialized, gendered subject as universal, provides the deep structure that these policies seek to protect.
Much of the literature identifies the origins of anti-DEI policy in post-2020 backlash politics, tracing it to foundational tensions within U.S. constitutional law (McGowan et al., 2025; Shaw, 2025). Crenshaw captures the speed and scale of the campaign to misrepresent Critical Race Theory, noting, “A lie gets around the world three times before the truth can put its boots on, and we are still looking for our boots” (The New Press, 2021). Her words reflect the profound epistemic distortion at play, where a complex legal theory has been weaponized into a cultural wedge, and the time needed to correct the record is persistently outpaced by the speed of disinformation. Gupton (2023, 2024) characterizes this dynamic as “viewpoint discrimination”, a direct assault on research and teaching that affirm equity or interrogate systemic oppression.
Beyond curriculum, the literature documents the emotional, institutional, and intellectual tolls on doctoral communities. Love (2016) theorized this violence as “spirit murdering,” describing how educational policies and practices function as “anti-Black state violence” that attacks not just bodies but the intellectual and spiritual vitality of Black students and scholars. Merriweather et al. (2024) describe a “spirit murder” of inquiry itself in the contemporary anti-DEI context. Faculty alter syllabi and censor reading lists (Cho et al., 2024). Students revise research agendas or withdraw from controversial topics altogether. Programs lose diverse applicants, and recruitment pipelines shrink (Garces, 2024; Doane & Unda, 2023). Even international students express hesitation about entering environments marked by erasure and surveillance.
Yet few analyses address what this manuscript contends: that anti-DEI policy is not merely political backlash but a form of biopolitical governance, a mode of regulating presence, knowledge, and legitimacy. These policies are not only about what can be said, but who is allowed to say it. They do not merely constrain curriculum; they delimit imagination.
This manuscript intervenes at that edge. It builds on the literature but refuses to treat policy as disembodied, as though it were a neutral text or abstract directive. Instead, it reads policy as embodied practice: lived through syllabi revisions, altered research agendas, and the silences imposed on scholars who must navigate what cannot be named. This article stages a narrative experiment, a counter-archive, a living dossier. It is both a submission and a refusal. A response to the chilling effect and the ongoing chill. It understands anti-DEI not just as a restriction, but as erasure made procedural. As knowledge made shadow.
2. Framing Theory and Method: On Refusal, Contiguity, and Shadow Epistemology
This article is not what you expect. It is an application, a fiction, a shadow, but no less real for it. It is a social fictive graduate application, built on what I call shadow epistemology, a way of knowing that emerges in the spaces between the empirical and the social, the measurable and the lived. It examines the systems and silences that perpetuate exclusion in graduate education, uncovering how policies, structures, and logics erase certain forms of knowledge while privileging others. It does not follow a traditional scholarly format, nor does it pretend to resolve the tensions it uncovers. Instead, it invites the reader to sit within the contradictions, to witness how erasure operates, and to imagine how resistance might emerge from the shadows.
The selection of specific genres within this application packet is deliberate and methodologically grounded. Each form was chosen for its capacity to expose particular violences while preserving what conventional academic prose would flatten. The cover letter and statement of purpose adopt institutional genres to reveal their coercive underpinnings, how they demand performance of fit while punishing authenticity. The CV becomes a counter-archive, documenting labor that institutional metrics refuse to recognize. Letters of recommendation are reimagined from three temporal positions: a mentor who escaped (witnessing institutional betrayal), an ancestor who was excluded (testifying to intergenerational erasure), and one that is redacted (embodying the contemporary silencing under surveillance). The writing sample fragments traditional scholarly prose to show how knowledge gets disciplined into acceptability. The poetic footnotes function as what Sharpe (2016) calls “wake work”—they carry the affective residue, the embodied knowledge that academic language cannot hold. Each genre is a methodological choice, selected to reveal different mechanisms of epistemic violence while preserving forms of knowing that exceed institutional capture.
The content emerges from what I term “archival convergence,” a braiding of documented testimony, policy analysis, and embodied memory. The narratives are neither purely autobiographical nor entirely fictional, but rather poetic reconstructions rooted in collective truths. They draw from informal conversations and observed experiences within doctoral communities navigating anti-DEI climates, analysis of redacted diversity statements, examination of revised syllabi, publicly available testimonies shared in academic forums and social media, and my own embodied archive of institutional encounters. The “letters of recommendation,” for instance, synthesize actual phrases from withheld letters, testimonies from faculty who left academia, and ancestral narratives recovered through family oral histories.
This manuscript stems from a larger project examining anti-DEI legislation across the United States (Gupton, 2023, 2024; Gupton & O’Sullivan, 2024). The research tracked activity in 16 states that enacted or implemented restrictions, assembling a comparative corpus of 29 state bills. Through comparative document analysis, the materials were coded for three recurrent mechanisms: restriction, narrative control, and epistemic erasure to trace how the same logics travel across law, policy, and classroom artifacts.
The analysis illustrates how power moves through policy not only to regulate institutions, but to discipline knowledge itself: shifting permissible language, redefining “fit” and “neutrality,” reallocating resources, and rendering certain topics unsayable to remain legible. Yet this manuscript is more than research output. It carries the trace of embodied knowledge: the instant reckoning of a stop that might not end, the insomnia of being named a “problem,” the smiling signatures that erase a past. In this application, those traces live in the margins—redactions, withholdings, footnotes—our shadow ledger. Tracking and remembering against erasure is shadow epistemology at work; it is resistance.
The CV items blend real experiences reported across multiple institutions with satirical amplification that reveals their absurdity. This methodological approach, what Campt (2017) calls “listening to images,” attends to what institutional data cannot capture: the weight of daily negotiation, the exhaustion of translation, the grief of erasure. These are stylized composites drawn from lived archival memory, reconstructed through what Brand (2001) identifies as “a kind of dwelling in the door of no return,” that space between documented history and embodied knowing.
This manuscript is a refusal dressed in formality. It adopts the architecture of a doctoral application packet to critique the very structures that regulate entry, belonging, and knowledge legitimacy in higher education. Drawing on traditions of critical pedagogy, poetic inquiry, and narrative refusal, this article combines fiction, critique, and memory to examine how doctoral education colludes with epistemic erasure, particularly in an era of intensifying anti-DEI legislation and institutional compliance.
This manuscript is not about a doctoral application. It is one.
This manuscript is comparative, not through institutional case analysis, but through epistemic juxtaposition. It places institutional discourse alongside lived refusal, policy logic alongside poetic testimony, form alongside fracture. It compares what doctoral education claims to cultivate with what it often silences, revealing the ideological tensions embedded within everyday academic forms. It does not contain findings; it is the finding. The method is inseparable from the narrative; the critique is braided into the form. This work is an enactment of what it names: the structural conditions that shape doctoral education in the age of epistemic erasure, and the narrative strategies scholars use to survive it.
This article also understands the anti-DEI policy movement through the lens of biopower (Foucault, 2007), but I write from within the very apparatus it critiques. As a Black scholar trained in predominantly white institutional frameworks, I have inhabited the contradictions this manuscript exposes, performing legibility while preserving illegible truths, citing the canon while carrying counter-memories, earning credentials from systems that systematically doubt my capacity to hold them. My positionality is not external to this analysis; it is constitutive of it. I write from what Hartman (2008) calls “the position of the unthought,” having been trained to think through frameworks that cannot think me. This location shapes my methodological choices: the turn to poetic method as a means to exceed disciplinary capture, the use of fiction to convey truths that empiricism cannot hold, and the deployment of institutional forms against themselves. When I theorize shadow epistemology, I theorize from within it—not as metaphor but as method, not as concept but as condition. The anti-DEI movement targets not abstract programs, but embodied presences like mine; not just curricula, but the possibility that we might teach from the knowledge our bodies carry.
Rather than offering prescriptive reforms, these policies operate through omission, fear, and the removal of language itself. In this context, the enforcement of silence becomes a condition of institutional belonging. This framing aligns with my forthcoming work on epistemic erasure and the political economy of anti-DEI legislation (Gupton, 2023, 2024, forthcoming; Gupton & O’Sullivan, 2024), where I argue that the real target is not a program or initiative, but the capacity of racialized knowledge to appear, persist, and name itself.
The form is social fiction (Leavy, 2016; Sweet et al., 2020), but it is also refusal (Grande, 2018; Simpson, 2017), critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2020), and poetic method (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Prendergast, 2009). It is indebted to Black feminist and decolonial thinkers (Anzaldúa, 2012; Lorde, 1984/2012; Wynter, 2003), as well as recent work on epistemic injustice (Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007), whose scholarship insists that knowing is not a neutral act—that method, meaning, and form are not separable. That the personal is not pre-theoretical, and the poetic is not apolitical.
The narrative structure draws on the genre of the doctoral admissions packet—statement of purpose, letters of recommendation, and writing sample— but these institutional forms are unsettled, broken open, and reconfigured to expose what they often conceal. Interwoven throughout are poetic footnotes, gestures of rupture, memory, and survival. Together, they form what I call a shadow epistemology: a way of knowing shaped by absence, by marginalization, by refusal to be erased. Shadow epistemology reflects the knowledge systems cultivated in the margins, ways of knowing that survive despite structural refusal, drawing strength from contradiction, loss, and ghosted archives.
This project echoes what Harney and Moten (2013) describe as the undercommons: the space of study beneath, beside, and beyond the university’s sanctioned forms, where knowledge is not produced for institutional recognition, but for collective survival. The manuscript does not conclude with a policy recommendation. It does not offer a framework for institutional reform. Its offering is its form. Its testimony is its method. Its truth is its being.
This work does not fit neatly into the categories of theory, method, or findings. It is all of them—at once, and on purpose.
The packet includes a cover letter, statement of purpose, CV, letters of recommendation (imagined and withheld), a writing sample, and a dissertation abstract. Interspersed throughout are poetic “footnotes” that speak from beneath and beyond the genre, refusing institutional legibility while testifying to intellectual and embodied survival.
This manuscript does not aim to mimic or parody. It seeks to expose. And in doing so, it asks: What counts as knowledge? Who gets to carry it? And what does it mean to apply to a system that was never meant to admit you?
2.1. Methodological Coda: On Verisimilitude and Scientific Contribution
This manuscript claims a scientific contribution through verisimilitude, not as mere “lifelike prose,” but as a rigorous mode of disclosure that renders mechanisms legible where conventional methods falter. In arts-based and social-fiction inquiry, verisimilitude is a test of explanatory fit: do readers who know these systems recognize the patterned logics at work, and does the text surface mechanisms they can then interrogate in their own sites? By staging comparative juxtapositions (policy language beside poetic testimony; admissions genres beside what they obscure), the manuscript offers an explanatory model of epistemic erasure as biopolitical governance and introduces shadow epistemology as a method for detecting and analyzing that governance in practice. This is not an abandonment of science; it is its extension beyond the confines of positivism, post-positivism, constructivism, and even critical theory, toward a paradigm capacious enough to treat silence, omission, and affect as data.
Beyond verisimilitude, this work claims catalytic validity (Lather, 1986), its capacity to mobilize recognition, resistance, and transformative action among readers navigating similar institutional conditions. If readers finish this manuscript and examine their own institutions’ shadow practices differently, if they recognize their exhaustion as systemic rather than personal, if they find language for experiences they could not previously name, then the work achieves its catalytic purpose. The manuscript does not just document erasure; it provides tools for detecting and resisting it, transforming individual experiences of silencing into collective recognition of systemic patterns.
Rigor here is not ornamental. It rests on traceable choices: (1) Genre selection criteria are analytic (each component of the “application” is chosen for its gatekeeping function and read against its omissions); (2) Compositing draws from lived experience and documentary materials to produce stylized composites that protect identities while preserving causal texture; (3) Triangulation occurs across forms, policy documents, curricular artifacts, fieldnotes, and poetic fragments, so that claims echo across sites rather than hinge on a single anecdote; (4) Positionality is explicit: the narrator writes from inside the system under study, and reflexive memos (here, the footnotes) function as an audit trail of interpretation. These practices align with established criteria for credibility, transferability, and analytic generalization in qualitative inquiry, while leveraging the heuristic power of art to reveal what standard instruments are not designed to hear.
The scientific value, then, is twofold: conceptual (naming and modeling erasure’s mechanisms) and practical (generating testable questions and actionable diagnostics for programs). Other researchers can apply this framework to their institutional contexts, producing comparable analyses of epistemic erasure’s local manifestations, thereby contributing to a cumulative understanding of its systemic operations. If readers can use this framework to examine their own syllabi, admissions memos, and “shadow practices,” to see what becomes sayable and unsayable under anti-DEI regimes, then the work has achieved scientific purchase. Social fiction here is not a detour from method; it is method, calibrated to phenomena that present as whispers, redactions, and procedural neutralities. This is why I call it shadow epistemology: it recognizes knowledge that persists outside the light of traditional scholarship, and supplies a disciplined way to study it.
Shadow epistemology, as both method and theoretical framework, is offered here as a heuristic, not a master key: an attentional practice for reading institutional documents against their silences, noticing knowledge that persists in unofficial spaces, and recognizing resistance in forms that evade institutional capture. It may be adapted to other sites of epistemic regulation (e.g., detention-education, prison-abolition pedagogies, Indigenous knowledge under settler surveillance), but always locally and alongside other methods. The framework’s transferability lies in its attention to the shadows cast by any system that claims total illumination.
2.2. Reader’s Note: How to Read This Application Packet
This manuscript is structured as a fictional doctoral application that refuses its own fiction. The components follow the conventional admissions sequence—cover letter, statement of purpose, CV, letters of recommendation, writing sample, and dissertation abstract—yet each is reimagined through poetic, narrative, and critical interventions. Each section operates simultaneously as testimony and analysis, method and findings, deliberately blurring boundaries between scholarly critique and embodied knowledge. The poetic footnotes function as a parallel text, sometimes glossing the main narrative, sometimes rupturing it, always carrying what the formal genres cannot hold. Readers new to arts-based or decolonial methods can proceed linearly or recursively; patterns and absences accrue across sections. For a consolidated synthesis of the contribution, see Section 10.1; for criteria of rigor and scientific value, see Section 2.1.
3. Cover Letter: An Invitation to a Reckoning
To the Admissions Committee,
I write to you from a position you may not recognize. It is not anchored in institutional prestige, nor bathed in the light of disciplinary legitimacy. I write from the shadow.
Not the shadow of failure, but of refusal. Not obscurity, but opacity. This is a shadow epistemology, a way of knowing shaped by the condition of being partially seen, often misread, and always at risk of erasure. It draws from what the archive omits and what the syllabus forgets. It does not beg for inclusion; it insists on presence.
What follows is an application in form only. It mimics the language, formatting, and structure required by doctoral admissions, but it does so while tracing the violence embedded in those very forms. This is a social fiction that refuses pretense—a dossier of testimony and critique. A mirror held to the structures that demand our assimilation while extracting our difference.
In the wake of coordinated legislative efforts to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, efforts that are not sudden but systemic, I offer this submission as both document and disruption. Framed as an admissions packet, it blends narrative, critique, and poetic method to confront how doctoral programs function as engines of epistemic conformity. Under the guise of excellence, they too often reproduce the very structures they claim to interrogate.
This is not an application for admission. It is an invitation to a reckoning.
Footnote 1: What It Cost to Knock
I dressed it in citation.
Polished it with theory.
Watered it down.
Held my tongue.
Then you called it authentic.
I shaped my voice to fit your frame,
I spoke my way to the threshold,
then waited for a door
that never opened.
Still—
you asked me to explain
why I came.
4. Statement of Purpose: Refusing Terms of Legibility
To the Admissions Committee:
I submit this statement not as a declaration of fit, but as an interrogation of the frame. If doctoral education promises the development of knowledge, then we must ask: Which kinds of knowledge are permitted to develop? Which are disciplined out of existence before they ever reach the seminar table?
My purpose is not to refine the discipline. It is to study the mechanisms by which it refines itself through silence, omission, and coercion. My research concerns epistemic erasure in doctoral education, particularly as it unfolds through anti-DEI legislation and the institutional compliance it induces. I investigate how academic structures—not just syllabi, but funding practices, admissions logics, and faculty norms—regulate the appearance and survival of racialized knowledge.
Shadow epistemology is not simply my method. It is my location. It is how I have learned to read absence, to listen for what is not cited, to name what is not funded, and to notice what kinds of truth require apology before utterance.
I draw from Black feminist thought, critical policy analysis, poetic inquiry, and political sociology. My questions are not abstract. They are embodied. They are inherited. They are carved from the friction between institutional forms and lived histories.
This is not a performance of disciplinary mastery. It is a reckoning with what the discipline refuses to master: contradiction, memory, grief, and rage.
I do not offer a sanitized proposal or a pre-packaged research trajectory. I offer this application—this manuscript—as evidence of my seriousness, my method, and my refusal.
I do not seek admission into the forgetting. I seek to study it.
I apply, then, not for acceptance but for reckoning.
I do not offer neutrality. I offer truth. Or at least, what remains of it.
Footnote 2: What You Call Fit
They told me to find my fit.
So I shrank.
Trimmed my questions.
Softened my voice.
Smoothed my anger into a research agenda.
And when I disappeared just enough,
they called it professionalism.
5. Curriculum Vitae of the Dispossessed
Applicant: Redacted
Date of Birth: Unrecorded
Citizenship: Unclaimed
Field(s) of Study: Refusal, Rupture, Memory
Education:
The Academy of Compliance
M.A. in Knowing When to Hold My Tongue
Trained under the weight of institutional violence mislabeled “rigor.”
Learned to cite Audre Lorde in APA format without crying.
Thesis: On Being the Only One in the Room and Still Invisible.
Survival University (Unaccredited)
B.S. in surviving racial gaslighting
Minored in grief
Tuition paid in silence, shame, and intergenerational debt.
Graduated with distinction in proximity to power.
Research Interests
Institutional mechanisms of erasure
Epistemic discipline and its discontents
Poetic refusal as method
Generational memory as data
Publications (Unpublished, Unwelcome, Unbothered)
“On Surviving Peer Review When the Peers Don’t See You”
“The Pedagogy of Policing: Notes from a Required Seminar”
“DEI is Dead, and You Killed It”
“I Wrote This in the Margins Because That’s Where You Put Me”
Works in Progress or Under Review
“Notes on Being a Diversity Admit” (rejected for being too real)
“Citations and Other Ghost Stories” (self-published in breath)
“When the Rubric Redlines You” (under perpetual revision)
Selected Presentations
2022—Invited to Speak, Declined to Perform.
2023—Uninvited Lecture on Structural Racism, delivered quietly to my mentee over coffee.
2025—Canceled myself before your institution could do it for me.
Awards and Distinctions
Most Tolerated Student of Color (Three Years Running)
Distinguished Service in Making You Feel Better About Yourselves
Recipient, Unspoken Grant for Holding It Together
Service
Provided emotional labor to a committee that forgot I was not on it.
Mentored students asking the questions I was not allowed to answer.
DEI task forces where DEI had already been declared dead.
References
Most have left the academy.
The rest are watching what they say.
Footnote 3: Qualifications
I learned to cite before I was seen.
Learned to listen twice before I spoke once.
Learned to read between the lines
because that is where we have always lived.
There is no section on the CV
for what we carry.
No line item for surviving invisibility.
No bullet point for not vanishing
when you were never fully there.
6. Letters of Recommendation
The materials that follow are letters of recommendation, though they may not conform to institutional expectations. You asked for endorsements, for testimony of my readiness, my promise, my fit. But those who could speak most truthfully have been silenced, disillusioned, or disappeared. What remains are letters written from the afterlife of the academy: one from a mentor who escaped, one from an ancestor who never had the chance, and one that never arrived—redacted before it could be sent.
Each letter bears witness. Not to my potential, but to the systems that tried to contain it.
6.1. Letter One: From the Mentor Who Escaped
From Dr. ________ (withheld at the recommender’s request)
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing this letter under protest.
Not because I do not support the applicant—I do, with more conviction than I have ever held for any student. I write in protest of the system that requires such letters in the first place. A system that asks the wounded to prove they are still breathing, and the brilliant to contort themselves into bullet points and buzzwords.
I knew the applicant before they had language for what they carried. Before they had the theory to name the wound. Even then, their questions frightened the room—not because they were dangerous, but because they were true. And truth, in the academy, is a liability if it arrives from the margins.
What this applicant brings cannot be measured in GRE scores, GPAs, or prestige metrics. They bring memory. They bring a method born of survival. They bring a refusal to perform neutrality in the face of epistemic violence.
They also bring exhaustion.
You will not find them agreeable. You will find them precise. You will not find them pliable. You will find them principled.
If you are looking for a steward of the status quo, look elsewhere. If you are ready to be transformed by someone who refuses to disappear, admit them.
If you cannot see what they offer, the fault is not theirs. It is yours.
Sincerely,
[Redacted]
Independent Scholar,
Somewhere Free
6.2. Letter Two: From an Ancestor Who Never Had the Chance
To Whom It May Concern (and I do hope you are concerned),
This child comes from a long line of knowing.
Not the kind you learn in books written by strangers with titles,
but the kind etched into your ribs,
the kind passed down in silence,
when speaking it out loud could cost you everything.
I can’t tell you what grades they earned,
but I can tell you about the stories they carry—
how they listened with both ears,
how they watched for what was not said,
how they remembered what the world tried to make them forget.
They are not applying to your program for prestige.
They are here to dig up what’s been buried.
To name what was never meant to be spoken in your halls.
To bring with them the bones of forgotten ancestors,
and ask you: what have you done with the truth?
If you’re looking for someone who will keep quiet,
this is not your candidate.
But if you’re ready to learn what cannot be taught in your curriculum—
how to sit with discomfort, how to witness history,
how to tend to knowledge like a living thing—
then let them in.
Let them in not because you are doing them a favor,
but because you have something to repent for.
Sincerely,
A Grandmother You Forgot to Ask
6.3. Letter Three: Redacted/Withheld
Status: Unable to Submit
This letter was prepared but ultimately withdrawn.
The writer cited concerns about professional repercussions, political sensitivities, and institutional surveillance.
The space below is what remains.
██████████████████████████████████████████
██████████████████████████████████████████
██ I would have written of their brilliance—
██ and how they made the rest of us uneasy in the best way.
█████████████████████████████████████████
██ They asked questions we didn’t have the courage to pose.
██ They made knowledge do what it was supposed to do.
█████████████████████████████████████████
██ That was the problem.
█████████████████████████████████████████
██ I’m sorry. I hope this silence speaks for itself.
█████████████████████████████████████████
No signature attached.
No institutional affiliation claimed.
6.4. Letter Four: From One Who Stayed (And Survived)
To the Committee,
You want to know if this applicant can succeed in your program. That is the wrong question. Ask instead: Will your program survive them?
I write this from a classroom where the walls have ears, but the students still learn to listen between the lines. Where the syllabus says one thing, but the conversation says another. Where we’ve learned to teach in code.
They tried to ban our books. So we became libraries. They surveilled our syllabi. So we taught in the margins. They monitored our language. So we developed new tongues.
This applicant comes from a tradition not of compliance, but of creative resistance. They know how to carry knowledge in places the state cannot search: in memory, in breath, in the space between citation and testimony.
At our HBCU, we’ve watched too many predominantly white institutions fold and comply. We’ve seen colleagues redact themselves, edit their questions, and perform a neutrality that is actually surrender. But here, in this space that was built for those you never meant to admit, we remember that resistance is our curriculum. It always has been.
This student learned from us how to make the illegal feel inevitable. How to teach freedom in the subjunctive mood. How to cite our ancestors in formats you haven’t invented yet.
You ask if they’re prepared for doctoral study. They’re prepared for something harder: Doctoral study that pretends it isn’t political while being nothing but.
We didn’t teach them to survive your program. We taught them to transform it. Even if you never know it happened.
With revolutionary care,
Dr. [Redacted]
Professor of What Remains
[HBCU name withheld for protection]
6.5. Footnote 4: The Silence Is the Letter
There were others.
One typed and deleted.
One whispered over the phone.
One written in a notebook
that vanished when her office was cleaned out.
Another
burned the night before tenure review.
Not all absences are forgettings.
Some are warnings.
Some are grief.
Some are
proof.
7. Writing (From the Margins) Samples
The following excerpt is submitted as a writing sample, though it does not resemble what is typically praised or published in doctoral admissions. It does not aim for neutrality. It will not prove my mastery of method. What it offers instead is an account, fragmented, embodied, unresolved, of how erasure enters the room before the seminar begins. This is not the work I was trained to write. It is the work I had to write in order to remain whole.
What follows is not just a sample of my scholarship.
It is evidence that I survived long enough to tell it.
7.1. Sample 1: On the Uses of Silence in Doctoral Education
There was a day in my first year when I learned the difference between what is said and what is known.
The seminar topic was “objectivity,” and the assigned reading had not a single author of color.
When I asked why, the professor said, “We’ll get to that later in the semester.” We didn’t.
Later, in office hours, I asked again. The professor lowered her voice and said, “You’re very brave to bring that up. Just be careful.”
Careful of what?
Careful of whom?
Careful not to know too much?
I began to catalog silences. Who interrupted whom. Whose comments were called “insightful.” Whose questions were reframed or unanswered. Whose anger was intellectualized. Whose joy was pathologized.
I learned that theory could be a hiding place.
That citations could perform forgetting.
That fitting in often meant editing out the parts of myself I most needed to bring.
This is not a complaint. It is an archive.
Not a grievance. A method.
Not an anecdote. A curriculum.
7.2. Sample 2: Reflection and Analysis: On Epistemic Discipline
This moment is not exceptional. It is institutional. It is what happens when the university defines rigor as repetition, and foundational as fixed. When doctoral education teaches students not to engage critically, but to inherit selectively. This is what I mean by epistemic discipline—not the field one studies, but the mechanism by which the field studies you back. Policing your voice, flattening your history, and rewarding your silence.
When I speak of Shadow Epistemology, I speak of the knowledge that survives despite this. The knowledge that is not peer-reviewed but people-reviewed. The knowing that shows up in the room before the reading list is posted.
Shadow epistemology is not a supplement to theory—it is a correction. It is what happens when we refuse to choose between story and scholarship, between grief and grammar. It is the practice of holding space for memory, for contradiction, for what the archive omits and what the institution punishes.
The canon is not neutral. It is structured by exclusion and maintained by fear. To study within it requires knowing when to bend, when to bow, and when to break. This writing sample is a break. A small one. But a necessary one.
This is not the work I was asked to submit.
It is the work I submit to ask:
Who gets to define what counts?
7.3. Footnote 5: What Counts
They counted the pages.
The sources.
The citations.
They counted publications.
Conference presentations.
Impact factors.
Hours of “professionalization.”
But they did not count
the weight of biting your tongue,
the nights spent rewriting yourself,
the fear that comes before every seminar comment.
They did not count
what it cost to be legible.
And they never will.
Because what counts
has always been decided
without us.
8. Dissertation Abstract—Shadow Work: Epistemic Erasure and the Afterlife of Doctoral Education
The following proposal fulfills the application requirement for a prospective dissertation topic. It adheres to the formal expectations of scholarly inquiry, including a clear title, a defined scope, and a viable methodology. But let us not pretend that structure ensures safety. The questions posed here are dangerous not because they are poorly formed, but because they name what academia would rather leave unnamed. What follows is less a proposal than a provocation, an attempt to reimagine what a dissertation might do when it refuses to reproduce the silence that trained it.
This dissertation examines how epistemic erasure is enacted, embodied, and resisted within doctoral education. Using narrative inquiry, critical policy analysis, and poetic method, the project explores how anti-DEI policies function as technologies of biopower, regulating not only institutional practices but also the conditions under which racialized knowledge may appear, persist, or be silenced.
Drawing on interviews, archival disruption, and autoethnographic fieldnotes, the dissertation traces how the threat of compliance restructures doctoral programs—how reading lists shrink, how applications become more cautious, how students’ survival requires performance over presence. The study situates these phenomena within broader histories of racialized governance in higher education, arguing that anti-DEI legislation is not merely political backlash but part of a longer lineage of epistemic discipline.
Rather than present findings in conventional academic prose, the dissertation incorporates vignettes, poetry, and counter-narratives as legitimate data forms. These ruptures are not illustrative flourishes; they are analytical interventions. They reflect what is often redacted from institutional reports: the grief of being misread, the endurance of silence, the cost of intellectual survival.
Ultimately, the dissertation does not claim to offer a solution. It offers a record. It names what the institution would rather remain procedural. It attends to the knowledge that endures not because of doctoral education, but despite it.
Before the research begins, the body remembers.
Footnote 6: Before the Box Is Checked
How many times
must I translate myself
before you call it fluency?
How many truths
must I prune
before you call it professionalism?
How many times
must I prove I belong
before I’m allowed to ask
why you don’t?
9. Diversity Statement: [Withheld]
The following section was intended to fulfill the application requirement for a diversity statement, an institutional genre increasingly emptied of meaning, even as it is weaponized against those it claims to include. I chose, instead, to withhold it. Not out of evasion, but as an act of refusal.
When the right to speak comes tethered to the demand that I narrate my difference in palatable terms, silence becomes a form of resistance. What follows is not a statement, but an absence that speaks.
[This statement has been withheld in accordance with state and institutional directives discouraging the explicit acknowledgment of race, equity, justice, or identity in admissions materials.]
Alternatively:
[This statement has been withheld in protest of the expectation that I narrate my worth through the lens of your discomfort.]
Footnote 7: Terms of Refusal
If you require a statement of diversity,
know that I am still here.
If you need evidence of inclusion,
read the silences I’ve survived.
If you’re looking for belonging,
ask why the burden to prove it
always falls on those most excluded.
If you believe in justice,
stop asking me to audition for it.
What remains now is not a summary, but a reckoning. The final pages of this packet return to the concept of stewardship—not as a credential to be earned, but as a question to be unlearned. The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate once envisioned stewards as those who could preserve, critique, and reimagine the disciplines they inherit. But under the weight of anti-DEI legislation, risk-averse leadership, and institutional compliance, stewardship has been hollowed into something else entirely: a mandate to reproduce exclusion more efficiently. What follows is a refusal to inherit that version of the role—and an invitation to remember what stewardship might still become.
10. Framing the Doctoral Imagination: On Stewardship and Refusal
What counts as knowledge? Who gets to carry it? And what does it mean to apply to a system that was never meant to admit you?
These questions opened the manuscript not as research questions or rhetorical flourishes, but as coordinates, markers of where we have been and where we must go. Through shadow epistemology, this manuscript responds: knowledge is not what survives peer review, but what survives erasure. It is not always carried in citation, but in memory, in breath, and in refusal. And to apply to a system that was never meant to admit you is to perform a ritual of exposure, to place your knowing on the altar of legitimacy, and to watch it be misread, dismissed, or punished.
Shadow epistemology teaches us to read not only what is written, but what is withheld. It reveals how power operates in procedural neutrality, in enforced silence, in the daily compromises demanded by institutional survival. It is a strategy of presence in systems designed to neglect you. This manuscript enacts that method; it does not simply describe erasure, it testifies to what remains after.
Viewed through the lens of biopower (Foucault, 2007), anti-DEI policies are not isolated legislative mandates. They are instruments of racialized governance, technologies of control that regulate which bodies and which knowledges may appear, persist, or be legitimized. These policies do not merely reshape administrative structures; they recondition doctoral education itself. They induce compliance through fear, reward conformity, and make silence look like safety.
Doctoral programs have long existed within structures of inequality, often masked by the language of merit, fit, and professionalism. The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate once called for stewards of the discipline—scholars who could preserve, critique, and reimagine the fields they inherited. But that ideal was layered atop a deeply racialized, gendered, and colonial apprenticeship model. In this moment, stewardship risks becoming a euphemism for obedience, for replicating disciplines without remaking them, for reproducing what is already broken.
The impact varies across different levels, disciplines, and institutional settings. Undergraduate students encounter restrictions through altered general-education curricula, canceled speakers, and narrowed co-curricular spaces; doctoral students face deeper epistemic violence, including dissertation topics deemed “too political,” funding withdrawn from critical projects, IRB and committee guidance that steers away from risk, and job-market coaching that rehearses strategic silence. Humanities programs report self-censorship in seminars, while STEM programs discover that even “objective” lines of inquiry, such as climate science, health disparities, and algorithmic bias, trigger scrutiny when results implicate power. The supposedly neutral sciences find themselves policed precisely when their findings threaten profitable ignorance.
What anti-DEI policies are doing to doctoral programs is quiet, but sweeping. They regulate admissions through dog-whistle language. They shape curricula through avoidance. They restrict faculty agency through plausible deniability. The result is not just institutional fear—it is epistemic erasure codified in the daily rhythms of graduate education. They reconfigure the terms of academic legitimacy, coercing faculty and institutions into self-surveillance and curricular compliance. In this light, epistemic erasure is not a byproduct of political backlash; it is a mechanism of governance.
This manuscript offers no neutral ground. It is both a method and refusal. It responds to the question posed by this special issue—how doctoral programs navigate legislative landmines—not with a map, but with testimony. It documents not just policy shifts, but the lived terrain of walking through those shifts barefoot.
If doctoral education is to remain a site of knowledge production, it must become a site of epistemic justice. That requires more than institutional reform. It requires risk. Risking critique. Risking form. Risking discomfort. Risking truth.
This manuscript is not a call for inclusion. It is an act of resistance. A provocation. A reckoning. And an invitation to begin again.
10.1. Synthesis and Convergences: What the Shadows Reveal
While the findings of this manuscript are intentionally embedded across genres rather than extracted from them, a set of convergences becomes legible when the materials are read together. First, epistemic erasure works through procedural banality. Across the CV, the redacted letter, and the withheld diversity statement, harm appears as administrative routine, the slow work of rubrics, templates, and “fit” criteria that render certain truths unsayable to remain legible. The CV’s absurd honors, the letter’s blacked-out testimony, and the statement that cannot be submitted show violence enacted by the forms themselves. The point is not spectacular censorship but the everyday choreography of omission: what is asked, how it must be answered, which tones and topics must be softened so the application can pass.
Second, resistance persists in forms institutions cannot readily recognize or regulate. The poetic footnotes, the ancestor’s letter, shadow syllabi, study circles, and coded pedagogies mark survival off-ledger, in kitchens and basements, in memory and breath, in the subjunctive mood where futures can still be spoken. These are not triumphal narratives; they are refusal practices that keep inquiry alive under constraint. Set against them is a third convergence: the application itself prefigures classroom-level erasure by sorting in advance. Statements of purpose, letters affirming “promise,” and performances of “professionalism” filter who enters and which questions are allowed to follow them in. Anti-DEI legislation does not invent these filters; it intensifies and legitimizes mechanisms already at work.
Taken together, these convergences trace governance operating biopolitically through fear and self-surveillance. What appears as “neutral” policy becomes a technology of regulation: syllabi are softened, topics renamed, archives trimmed, and people coached into strategic silence. Instances of refusal remain, uncensored readings protected by committees, off-campus seminars, and shadow syllabi, but they are fragile, uneven, and personally costly. The implication is practical as well as conceptual: defending legacy DEI initiatives is insufficient without recognizing admissions, evaluation, and mentorship as sites of epistemic regulation. Shadow epistemology offers a practical diagnostic for this work, reading genres for what they render unsayable, protecting study practices the ledger cannot hold, and revising the language of institutional “risk” toward criteria of epistemic justice.
This analysis centers the U.S. context and primarily draws from public research universities, where state legislation exerts direct force on policy, curriculum, and personnel. Private institutions may navigate similar pressures differently, buffered by endowments, governance structures, or mission commitments that afford greater discretion. Community colleges and most liberal arts institutions sit largely outside the scope here, as they typically do not host doctoral-granting programs.
The focus is doctoral education in the humanities and social sciences, where epistemic questions are constitutive of disciplinary identity. STEM fields may experience anti-DEI pressures differently; early evidence suggests that even ostensibly “neutral” sciences encounter constraint when inquiry touches environmental justice, public health disparities, or algorithmic bias. Those dynamics warrant dedicated study beyond this manuscript’s purview.
Methodologically, this is an arts-based, social-fiction project grounded in shadow epistemology and informed by comparative document analysis. The dataset and composites privilege pattern over person: identities are protected; internal deliberations and sealed records are not fully accessible; some counter-practices may be underreported due to risk. As such, claims are offered in the register of verisimilitude and transferability, not statistical generalization: readers are invited to test the mechanisms named here against their own admissions artifacts, syllabi, and committee practices.
Finally, the policy environment is evolving. Findings reflect the period and corpus analyzed; subsequent legislation or institutional responses may alter the landscape in ways that exceed this account. These limits delineate scope rather than diminish applicability; they are offered to guide responsible uptake across varied institutional sites and to invite replication, extension, and contestation.
10.2. Footnote 8: A Steward of the Discipline
I did not come to be admitted. I came to witness.
To speak from the margins of your forms, the footnotes of your canon, the silences in your syllabus.
I came to show you the cost of your silence—and the cost of mine.
If I am to be a steward, it will not be of your discipline as it stands.
It will be of the rupture.
The memory.
The voices archived in bone and breath.
The knowledge passed down in kitchens, in rhythms, in dreams—
The kind of knowing that survives erasure because it refuses to be institutionalized.
Let the record show: I did not come merely to apply.
I came to name the wound.
To study its shape.
To refuse its inheritance.
And to leave something truer in its place.
11. Enrollment Response Letter: I’ll Build My Own University
To the Office of Graduate Admissions,
Thank you for your consideration. After reviewing the offer, spoken or implied, I have decided not to accept admission into your forgetting.
Your program is rich in prestige but poor in memory.
The syllabus is deep, but not wide.
The canon you ask me to steward was built by hands that never imagined mine.
You call it excellence.
I have learned to call it erasure.
I did not apply to be accepted.
I applied to bear witness.
And now, having done so, I decline.
Instead, I will build something else.
Not an ivory tower, but a clearing.
Not a seminar, but a circle.
Not a discipline, but a living thing.
A university without gates.
A curriculum made of breath.
A citation practice that remembers.
I have nothing further to submit—
except this refusal.
And these seeds.
Sincerely,
A Scholar Who Still Knows How to Grow
11.1. Footnote 9: The Terms of Stewardship
They said I would steward the discipline.
So I came with seeds.
But they handed me a fence.
11.2. Footnote 10: Notes on Survival as Method
There are programs that refused to die.
Faculty who chose unemployment over silence.
Students who defended dissertations
on topics the state forbade—
calling them something else
until the signatures dried.
A professor in a Southern state hid Baldwin in a biology syllabus.
A program meets off-campus now.
A department that officially doesn’t exist
will graduate three PhDs this year.
This is not victory.
It is what we’ve always done:
made a way out of no way.
Studied in the dark.
Carried the knowledge they tried to burn.
The Underground Railroad was also a university.
The kitchen table was a seminar.
The church basement was a library.
We’ve been here before.
We’re still here.
11.3. Footnote 11: The Proof
To those who read this and recognize themselves:
You are not alone.
You are not lost.
You are not the problem.
You are the proof.
Thank you for reading what I was never supposed to write.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
This application would not exist without the teachers who never made it into faculty directories, the scholars who left before they were broken, and the ancestors who passed down truths that still do not fit your formatting guidelines.
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Footnotes
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