Doctoral Coaching

Selective. Application-based. Limited to four clients per academic year.

Doctoral research is demanding, intellectually, structurally, and institutionally. Many PhD students develop projects that are conceptually ambitious yet difficult to stabilize within conventional academic expectations — especially in interdisciplinary, movement-based, or practitioner-informed domains.

I work with a small number of doctoral students each year on dissertations that bridge scholarly theory and lived practice. Coaching is offered on a strictly limited, application-based basis: I accept up to five new clients per academic semester. This page describes what coaching looks like, who I work well with, and how to apply.

Who I Work With

I am particularly well-suited to support students who are:

• Designing qualitative or theoretical dissertations
• Working with autoethnography or practice-based research
• Bridging scholarly theory and lived practice
• Engaging movement-based learning, ecological approaches to adaptation, cross-cultural practice, embodiment, or transformation studies
• Studying in transformative, integral, transpersonal, or interdisciplinary doctoral programs
• Struggling to translate embodied insight into structured academic argument

If your project feels intellectually ambitious but structurally unstable, this is the kind of work I do.

Track Record

I served as Fellow and Senior Fellow at the Center for Writing and Scholarship at the California Institute of Integral Studies from 2022 to 2024, working weekly with 5–7 PhD students at all stages of dissertation work — idea generation, literature review, proposal development, drafting, revision, APA, and defense preparation. I have led repeated workshops at CIIS on autoethnography, bringing personal narrative into academic writing, presentation craft, dissertation process navigation, and data analysis via bricolage. I have taught three concurrent sections of doctoral-level qualitative research methods.

My own doctoral dissertation — Becoming Imperceptible — was a conceptually complex transdisciplinary project integrating ecological learning, poststructural cultural theory, phenomenology, autoethnography, and cross-cultural analysis. I have navigated firsthand the work of holding a conceptually ambitious project together through proposal, draft, committee, and defense. know what it takes.

My Approach

I approach coaching as:

• Collaborative but not directive
• Critical but constructive
• Intellectually demanding
• Grounded in methodological accountability

Where appropriate, I draw on ecological ways of thinking about perception and attunement—not as metaphor, but as practical tools for identifying gaps, misalignments, and unexamined assumptions in research design.