Forge and Flex: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Resilience Among Indonesian PhD Mama Scholars

As four Indonesian PhD mama scholars in the United States, we came together to make sense of our journeys while writing dissertations with children on our laps, praying before presentations, and missing home as we tried to build one here. This collaborative autoethnography examines how we cultivate resilience at the intersections of motherhood, academic life, and cultural displacement. Through journal entries and analytical memos, we engage in individual reflection. However, it is through our collective reflexivity, which is rooted in care, reciprocity, and connection, that we transform our struggles into shared resilience and decolonial resistance. Our reflections reveal that resilience is not an individual act of pushing through, nor is it solely about personal grit or agency. Instead, resilience emerges through faith, familial ties, and shared cultural rituals that sustain relationality and interdependence. Against dominant narratives that emphasize solitary achievement, we offer stories grounded in relational care, spiritual grounding, and collective endurance. In centering our lived experiences, we propose a feminist decolonial collaborative autoethnography to critically co-construct and enliven the meaning of resilience, one shaped not by isolation but by interconnectedness and interdependence.