ABSTRACT. This collaborative autoethnographic reflection explores the doctoral journey of an Argentine scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on how solidarity-based mentoring enabled personal transformation and resistance to neoliberal academic logics. Writing collaboratively across the positions of doctoral candidate and informal mentor, we trace how the micro-gestural landscapes of scholarly-becoming can be honoured or suppressed by supervisory arrangements. Formal supervision provided technically adequate guidance, yet interactions remained bounded by efficiency, procedural compliance and writing conventions that reinforced epistemic gatekeeping. A pivotal shift occurred through an informal relationship with a Hispanic academic who reframed the candidate’s struggle not as an individual deficit but as systemic exclusion. Through patient guidance and relational care, this mentor decoded the hidden curriculum and challenged prescriptive thesis formats that privilege linear, Western epistemologies and marginalise situated narratives. In contesting the academic fairytale, this account shows how solidarity-based relationships of care create spaces of resistance: bridging linguistic and cultural disjunctures, legitimising diverse knowledge systems and fostering intellectual autonomy. It advocates mentoring models rooted in solidarity, cultural attunement and ethical relation, offering implications for supervisors, doctoral programmes and international education policy. By centring care-as-resistance, the reflection proposes a relational framework that counters epistemic violence and advances more equitable transnational scholarship, articulated through three principles: (1) relational attunement to systemic exclusion, (2) curricular legibility that protects epistemic plurality and (3) ethical care that validates emotional struggles whilst enabling scholarly autonomy.

Keywords: care-as-resistance; collaborative autoethnography; international doctoral study; epistemic gatekeeping; solidarity; Aotearoa New Zealand; micro-gestures.

How to cite: Rodriguez, C., & Ramirez, E. (2026). From isolation to solidarity: Decoding the fairytale through care-as-resistance for epistemic plurality. Knowledge Cultures, 14(2), 188–207. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc142202610 

Received February 28, 2026 • Received in revised form June 22, 2026
Accepted July 15, 2026 • Available online August 1, 2026