‘Will you be my mentor?’ Feminist mentoring at mid-career for institutional change

Abstract

This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each other from cynicism and despair. Placing these experiences and dialogues in conversation with the existing literature on mentoring, we address the ways that mentoring can both reproduce and transform the neoliberal university, while simultaneously exploring the tensions these possibilities produce in the context of mid-career feminist mentoring. We discuss particular challenges associated with mid-career mentoring, focusing primarily on our roles as feminist, anti-racist mentors to non-traditional students and junior faculty. While recognizing that there is no clear solution to the challenges of feminist mentoring and institutional change, we examine various models of mentoring, highlighting both the potential and limitations of informal mentoring in producing institutional change. Our intention is that this dialogical piece of writing allows us to support each other as we share our own reflections, while offering mentoring advice for colleagues at different career stages. While mentoring can open up the possibility for minor disruptions and is an essential coping mechanism, it is just one small part of the struggle to challenge the structural inequality of the academy.

Keywords:

• Feminist mentoring
• institutional change
• mentoring
• mid-career
• neoliberal university
• slow scholarship

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors of this themed issue and to the reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for helping us to clarify some of our arguments, and for encouraging us to share more details regarding the collective writing and mentoring process that produced this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Winifred Curran

Winifred Curran is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Geography at DePaul University. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of gentrification on the urban landscape. She is the author of Gender and Gentrification (Routledge 2018) and co-editor, with Trina Hamilton, of Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental gentrification (Routledge 2018).

Trina Hamilton

Trina Hamilton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Co-Director of the Center for Trade, Environment and Development at SUNY-Buffalo (UB). She is also affiliated with the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. Her research focuses on governance networks, urban sustainability, and ethical markets. Trina’s research and commentary has been featured in the popular press, including The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Post. She is currently working on a research project on the ethical diamond market, and she is the co-editor, with Winifred Curran, of Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification (Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City Series 2018).

Becky Mansfield

Becky Mansfield is Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. Her research is in nature-society geography and feminist science studies, with a focus on chemical geographies, environmental health knowledges, and the politics of deregulation.

Alison Mountz

Alison Mountz is geography professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Laurier University. Her work explores how people cross borders and access migration and asylum policies. Before moving to Laurier, Mountz was at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She spent two years at Harvard’s Canada Program, most recently as the Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies. Mountz’s research explores migration, displacement, borders, detention, and asylum. Her first monograph, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, was awarded the Meridian Book Prize from the Association of American Geographers. In 2018, Mountz published Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States, with Jenna Loyd. Mountz directs Laurier's International Migration Research Centre, edits Politics & Space, and belongs to the College of the Royal Society of Canada.

Margaret Walton-Roberts

Margaret Walton-Roberts is a professor in the Geography and Environmental studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University, and affiliated to the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo Ontario. Her research has examined South Asian migration with a focus on gender and skilled migration, and she has carried out numerous research projects on transnational skilled migration and immigrant and refugee settlement and integration in Canada. Recent co-edited publications include; ‘Diasporas, Development and Governance’ published with Springer Global Migration Series and ‘The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept’ with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Marion Werner

Marion Werner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Co-Director of the Center for Trade, Environment and Development at SUNY-Buffalo (UB). Her research is located at the nexus of critical development studies, feminist theory, and political economy with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Global Displacements: The making of uneven development in the Caribbean (Wiley, 2016) and an editor of the journal Antipode. She recently co-edited The Doreen Massey Reader and Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (Agenda, 2018).

Risa Whitson

Risa Whitson holds a PhD in Geography, Pennsylvania State University and is associate professor in Department of Geography and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Ohio University. Her research interests include informal and nonstandard work, geographies of birth and reproduction, gender and development, and feminist methodologies. She has published articles in Social and Cultural Geography, Antipode, and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, among others. As a jointly-appointed faculty member in Geography and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dr. Whitson has taught upper-level courses in social geography, gender and development, and global feminisms for over a decade.