Mentoring across difference: success and struggle in an academic geography career

Abstract

This autobiographical account of a black female feminist geographer’s experiences with mentoring and success in the academy offers analysis, lessons and strategies. My distinctive graduate school experience, with a pioneering all-female feminist geographers dissertation committee, plus a complex mix of intentional and fortuitous multidimensional mentoring has contributed to a successful academic geography career. Yet, I’ve had to overcome obstacles stemming from intersections of gender and other forms of difference, primarily race and immigrant status. Although there are limits to mentoring practices that emphasize caring and collegiality, I highlight and recommend feminist-inspired mentoring strategies that forge alliances across race-ethnicity, gender, nationality, generation, institutional and locational differences as interventions that lessen the struggles, challenges or marginalization reported by many foreign-born black feminist geographers and other women of color in US institutions of higher education.

Keywords:

• Academic career
• autobiography
• collaboration
• difference
• feminist geography
• mentoring

Acknowledgements

Very special thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided extensive feedback and constructive insights on the first version of the paper. I am indebted to Karen Falconer Al-Hindi and Denise Knight for excellent editorial work and advice for revisions to improve the paper. I also thank the journal editor for steadfast support throughout.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo

Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo is professor of geography at State University of New York, College at Cortland. A 2010 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and the AAG 2016 Distinguished Teaching Honors recipient, she serves on the editorial boards of African Geographical Review, The Geography Teacher, and WAGADU: Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies; and she previously served on the editorial board of Gender, Place and Culture, and on the Advanced Placement Human Geography Test Development Committee. She served as President of the New York African Studies Association and co-edited two books on African studies. She is co-editor (with Ann Oberhauser) of Global Perspectives on Gender and Space (Routledge).