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Ana Nurhasanah Surjanto, Monash University, AustraliaAbstract
This article presents a scholarly autoethnography that intertwines multiple aspects, covering the personal, spiritual, and intellectual journey of an Indonesian Muslim woman pursuing a PhD in Australia. It reflects on the lived experience of navigating the doctoral process, chapter by chapter, in which academic labour is sustained by daily prayers performed five times a day. Prayer, as both a spiritual discipline and an embodied practice, provides continuity, grounding, and resilience, positioning scholarly writing as inseparable from acts of faith and emotional endurance. The narrative demonstrates how each stage of the doctoral journey corresponds to confirmation, data collection, analysis, and submission. Drawing on Islamic feminism and care-focused feminism, this work highlights how women’s voices and lived realities must be placed at the centre of both religious and academic discourse, challenging reductive interpretations that marginalise women’s contributions to international education. Meanwhile, Institutional Ethnography (IE) provides an analytic lens for connecting personal experiences to broader institutional structures, covering key requirements and university regulations. Through situating the self within these intersecting frameworks, this autoethnography illustrates how prayer, care, and writing form a triadic structure of survival, resilience, and agency for Muslim women scholars in the Western academic field. Ultimately, the article contributes to discussions of international doctoral education by foregrounding how faith and care practices are not peripheral but central to the intellectual and institutional negotiations of Muslim women’s academic lives.
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Conference: SEACE2026Stream: International Education
This paper is part of the SEACE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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