The DIY PhD
The Universe is our University
What’s a DIY Phd?
A DIY PhD is creating a deeper education that honors learning in our bodies and spirits as much as our minds.
It’s a reclamation of education for the Earth and legitimizing the knowledges held in our bodies and communities.
Our DIY PhDs thrive when we are in community, connecting to intuition, habitat, and ancestor guides, in cycles of unlearning and learning. Our DIY PhDs are interdisciplinary, honoring multi-species ways of knowing, and unfolding as pathways of resonance through life.
Your DIY PhD is yours! There is no one right way to create your program.
We recommend beginning with a cohort – at least one other person whom you love to learn with – and a weekly time to meet during the semester. Most DIY PhDs take between 4 to 8 years to complete.
A DIY PhD
finds rhythms in the seasons, roots in identity and habitat, and is co-created by a cohort.
DIY PhD Dissertations
DIY PhD Dissertations
Ecocene Press has released our very first DIY PhD Zine with how-to prompts + featuring the research of 7 DIY PhDers: Arianne Ayu Alizio, Chayo (Rosario Luis), j. nyla ink mcneill, Lyn Pacificar, Sapito (Jenny Montalvo), sevine clarey, and Susannah Simpson.
Creating a DIY PhD is
a loveletter • a habitat offering • a creative passion • community • ceremony • a shift towards plant, soil, ancestors, water, multispecies kin
Our School offers a Year One Course for DIY PhDers seeking mentorship, structure, and weekly meetings in like-minded community to begin mapping their emergent programs.
There is no prerequisite nor pressure to know what you are going to do before beginning. Participants usually spend the first semester connecting to bodies, community and habitat; unlearning and composting old limiting beliefs; mapping their interests; and opening to their intuition and spirit guides.
The second semester is when participants begin to really see their programs emerge, find rhythms of resonance within their research and work, and complete the first year with clarity around what their DIY PhD is about. The first year is an initiation.
Sign up for our Loveletter to be the first to hear about future offerings.
Now available: a limited edition DIY PhD Activity Deck by Sarita Doe. Order yours today!
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Choose a card at random for divination as to what will help your current path or find the activity listed in the accompanying booklet that most resonates for you at this time. Whether you are an independent artist, scholar, educator, healer, and/or activist; the DIY PhD Activity Deck supports you in bringing your dream projects to life. The cards are organized by themes to support you at every stage in your journey.
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The Deck includes 70 cards with illustration on one side and a prompt on the back, as well as an activity booklet in a cotton screen-printed bag. The booklet describes how to create your own DIY PhD, highlights the seven thematic areas of support, and offers examples of how to use the deck.
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The deck is printed in Ohlone Lands, Richmond, California by Greenerprinter. The cards are made from kraft cardstock with a plant-based coating and soy-based ink. While the cards will last while stored indoors, ultimately they can be composted. The booklet is printed with soy-based ink on recycled glossy paper. A cotton drawstring bag carries the cards and booklet.
How it works
Cohorts meet weekly for two hours during the first semester to deepen trust in ourselves and our path.
Each class consists of a check-in to center and learn from our emotions, an incantation to call in support from ancestor and spirit guides, embodiment practice to open the channels for our learning to flow, and guided meditation and/or mapping prompt to begin seeing our programs emerge.
During the second semester, participants meet biweekly in smaller mini-cohorts and biweekly in the large class group. The mini-cohorts can continue in their own autonomous learning path after the Year One Course is complete, or choose to join our cocreation portals to continue their studies in a facilitated group continue at any time in the future.
How it Started
In late August of 2013, David Whitaker and Sarita Doe had their sketchbooks open, surrounded by sunlight and succulents we had planted years prior when just beginning graduate school for Art at UCLA. Sarita talked about wanting to continue pursuing higher education, but without going into debt or sacrificing her budding Earth-based spiritual practice, embodied well-being, or interest in non-Western bodies of knowledge.
Their classroom moved around the city and followed wherever their passions and interests took them. They met weekly and followed what felt fun, healing and resonant. They created countless exercises to center creativity and grow intuition as they learned. Whatever was happening in their daily lives was integral to their program, which shifted with their life experiences.
David pointed to the words “DIY PhD” in his sketchbook and Sarita said “YES!” And so began their 6-year, self-guided program.
Meet Sarita Doe, our Facilitator
Sarita Doe is an Earthworker, parent, painter, author, and educator living in occupied Ohlone Lands of Cajun, Celtic and Bolivian ancestry. She paints stories, regenerates habitat, and cocreates pedagogy in service to global movements for multi-species sovereignty and planetary liberation.
Meet Quetza, our TA, or Transformational Alchemist
Quetza is an Indigenous Two-Spirit person in this world. They continue to learn more about these identities through Mexica danza, Mexica temezcal ceremonies, and plant medicine ceremonies. Quetza is the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature Youth Hub Coordinator. Their work centers the Intersections of Climate Justice, Indigenous Liberation, and the Rights of Nature.
A DIY Phd
honors learning in body, mind, spirit, emotion, habitat, creativity and community
DIY PhD Cohorts Gain:
Trust in themselves and the Universe
Structure for organizing and reaching their goals
Clarity in their purpose and paths of learning
Connection to their guides and intuition
Creative play in supportive community
Auto-ethnographic research methodologies
Connection to the knowledge held in their bodies & in our Earth body
Mapping to manifest their dream work, see the intersections of their passions & plan the pathway of their creative pursuits
FAQs including requirements & tuition:
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No previous institutional degrees are required! A DIY PhD program can happen in tandem with an institutional program, instead of one, or after one!
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No! You can come knowing exactly what you know at the time our program begins. We honor cycles of not-knowing as much as cycles of knowing. We support participants in mapping all of their passions, pursuits, and areas of potential study and learning what common threads emerge as especially resonant for their DIY PhD. These paths will also change and shift throughout the program.
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We are legitimizing ourselves.
The DIY PhD is a self-accrediting degree program, and currently not guaranteed recognition by any governmental or formal institution. We are reclaiming our own agency and autonomy in deeper and higher educations! School for the Ecocene offers mentorship for planetary learners in their first year of self-guided higher and deeper education.
DISCLAIMER: We do believe that many professions require technical training that would be unsafe to approach in a DIY fashion, such as engineers or surgeons. As artists, teachers, healers and Earthworkers, however, we feel confident that we can co-create these dream programs with connections to resources in our communities and DIY PhD guides like the Textbook for the Ecocene.
Additionally, many planetary learners choose to participate in the DIY PhD alongside or to complement more traditional academic programs in order to meet their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs that are often ignored in higher education.
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DIY PhD tuition is currently offered at a sliding scale.
Level 1 for people with access to under $40,000/year income or wealth: $180/month for 8 months, or $1200 paid at once, saving $240.
Level 2 for people with access to $40,000 – $80,000/year income or wealth: $380/month for 8 months, or $2700 paid at once, saving $340.
Level 3 for folks with access to over $80,000/year income or wealth: $580/month, or $4200 paid at once, saving $440.
We have four scholarships available for low-income Black and Indigenous scholars in need of financial support. If this applies to you, please indicate in the application.
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Our curricula moves through monthly themes based on the movements and cycles in our planet and solar system: seed, rooting, water, fire, green, air, connection, cosmos. We tune into trusting the rhythm and pace of our dream lives with our bodies, seasons, cyclical unlearning, relearning and healing. In general, each class includes a check-in, a movement practice, incantation, meditation, and a guided mapping activity. The roots of our learning connect to ancestral lineages based in knowledges we hold in our bodies, ecosystem medicine, Ayurvedic teachings, Earth-based spirituality, critical pedagogy, liberatory frameworks like reparations, unsettling, decolonization and more.
The first semester is focused on assessing where we are currently at, connecting to our bodies, habitat and emotions as primary sites of learning, growing as a learning community, unlearning and identifying the connections to Earth and spirit guides like ancestors and our own deepest and highest selves that will help our dream programs to unfold before us, with ease.
The second semester is when we meet biweekly in a large cohort, and biweekly in smaller self-organized mini-cohorts to really clarify what our purpose, projects and learning paths will be. By the completion of this Year One Course, participants are set up to continue learning and creating in any way they desire.
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Cohort sizes have ranged fro 2 - 22. The average cohort is 14 people.
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Yes. As of Spring 2022, we have a three-month course each semester called “Dissertation Integration,” in which anyone already on their DIY PhD path is welcome to join a weekly container for mapping, centering in on our Dream Dissertations, and co-working as we create our projects. Additionally, Sarita loves providing references and coaching to students who complete our Year One program.
What Folks Are Saying
We are creating the deepest and highest education of our dreams.
Our current cohort enrollment is closed. Sign up for our Loveletter to hear about future offerings, or write to hello@ecocene.school to reach out about small group and 1:1 coaching.
