The cultural politics of a sense of failure in feminist anti-racist mentoring

Abstract

A sense of failure can be a central motivation and questioning force that pushes us as feminist geographers in uncomfortable, yet potentially productive, directions. Where failure has been applied as an analytic lens to geographical research, the ‘doing’ of our profession extends beyond fieldwork to our classrooms and mentoring relationships. This article argues that there is value in proactively treating our feelings of failure as resources not only to improve our individual feminist anti-racist mentoring practices but also to use emotional residues to inspire broader conversations that can collectively disrupt masculinist, racist, heteronormative, and ableist professional norms. It is too easy to individualize and demonize failure when instead it needs to be institutionally contextualized and cooperatively understood in order to be leveraged for social change. Drawing upon methodological practices of critical self-reflection and collective biography, we interrogate four empirical examples of dyadic mentoring and two collective co-mentoring initiatives. Feelings of failure are used as an analytic lens into the cultural politics of mentoring relationship from a mentor’s perspective.

Keywords:

• Collective biography
• failure
• Feminist anti-racist mentorship
• higher education
• self-reflexivity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at Gender, Place and Culture for seeing the potential of this article and encouraging us to push further. We would also like to thank all of the students who have worked with us and mentored us over the years. We have learned so much from you; you inspire us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Laliberté

Nicole Laliberté is a feminist political and cultural geographer who studies systems of oppression and possibilities for change as they manifest in systems of higher education. Originally trained in feminist geopolitics and exploring the theoretical and empirical intersections of gender, security, and international development as they manifested in post-war peacebuilding programs in northern Uganda, Dr. Laliberté now applies her feminist geopolitical lens to institutions of higher learning in North America to examine how systems of oppression such as settler colonialism, anti-black racism, islamophobia, and homophobia shape educational spaces and processes. As part of this work, she investigates the potential of feminist and anti-racist pedagogies for producing anti-oppressive educational experiences and reshaping institutions of higher learning.

Alison L. Bain

Alison L. Bain is a feminist urban social geographer who studies contemporary urban and suburban culture. Her research examines the complex relationships of cultural workers and LGBTQ2S populations to cities and suburbs in Canada and Germany with particular attention to questions of identity formation, place-making, spatial politics, and neighbourhood change. Her writing focuses on the (sub)urban geographies of artistic labour, creative practice, and cultural production and has involved the development of critiques of creative city theory and cultural planning in their application to small- and mid-sized cities and suburbs. She is especially interested in contested processes of social inclusion and social exclusion in neighbourhoods as triggered by both by bottom-up and top-down arts-led urban redevelopment initiatives as well as queer place-making practices.