Mentoring with: reimagining mentoring across the university

Abstract

Traditional, formal mentoring structures established within the space of the university can be rooted in patriarchal systems of power, hierarchy, and exclusion that perpetuate neoliberal and capitalist understandings of individualism and exceptionalism. This model privileges certain forms of knowledge and expertise, often that of senior, tenured faculty rather than those who are ignored or overlooked as ‘experts’ such as historically underrepresented tenured and untenured faculty, contingent faculty, and staff. In this paper, we seek to reimagine the concept of the traditional mentoring relationship rooted in power and hierarchy into a more democratic, empowering model across the space of the university. We do this by expanding upon the concept of power mentoring which emphasizes mentoring networks rather than individual relationships. Power mentoring centers reciprocal support and mutual benefit, infusing a feminist ethics of care into the spaces and structures of the neoliberal university. We draw on Joan Tronto’s caring with to frame mentoring as collective, collaborative, and democratic: mentoring with. Based upon a collective reading of Ensher and Murphy ’s Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Protégés Get the Most Out of their Relationships and conversations from our faculty learning community about mentoring, we argue that mentoring relationships within the spaces of the university should emphasize the role of dynamic networks between faculty, staff, and administrators to build upon existing feminist praxis to develop a more inclusive, geographic system of mentoring, which enables participants to grow, develop, and learn with one another.     

Archives and care: Caring archival research practices in geography

Archival research has been long recognized as a key method in geography, and such research continues to appeal to scholars excavating historical influences on contemporary places. At the same time, geographical literature on care is growing rapidly. However, while geographers have often implemented care into their archival research and practice, these literatures have remained largely distinct from each other. In this paper, I bring archives and care into closer conversation. Drawing on existing geographical literature on care and on archival methods, work in archival studies, and my own research and ethnographic experiences in archives, I show how the socio-material practices of geographers in the archives help generate spaces of care, where ethical caring practices exist, and caring relationships flourish. I demonstrate how archival work in geography and beyond includes relationships of care between archivists, researchers, and archival records. I share some examples and strategies that geographers and other researchers can—and do—follow in maintaining, continuing, and repairing archival relationships, even in times of precarity and uncertainty.     

Still methodologically becoming: collaboration,feminist politics and ‘Team Ismaili’

This article mobilizes a feminist analytic to examine team research and collaborative knowledge production. We center our encounter with team research – a collectivity we named ‘Team Ismaili’ – and our study with first- and second-generation East African Shia Ismaili Muslim immigrants in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We draw upon feminist politics to highlight the ways in which ‘Team Ismaili’ at once destabilized and unwittingly reproduced normative academic power relations and lines of authority. A ‘backstage tour’, of ‘Team Ismaili’ shows the messiness and momentum of team research and sheds light on how collaborative knowledge production can challenge and reconfirm assumed hierarchies. Even as we are still methodologically becoming, through this discussion we strive to interrupt the prevailing silence on team research in human geography, to prompt more dialogue on collaboration and to foreground the insight garnered through feminist politics.     

Emotional masking and spill-outs in the neoliberalized university: a feminist geographic perspective on mentorship

This paper addresses the emotional dimensions of academic mentorship from a student mentee perspective and contributes to an emerging literature on geographies of emotion in higher education. It presents a pedagogical practice of self-reflexive co-mentorship – self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring – and deploys it methodologically to analyze three biographical narratives. From different student mentee vantage points, these narratives reveal how the scales of the body, the family, and the nation are interwoven within the geopolitical and manifest within mentoring relationships. We argue that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentorship allows people at different academic career stages to share personal experiences of navigating the academy as a means to challenge institutional systems of power. Our argument answers three questions: How and why do we express and manage our emotions in mentoring relationships? What spatial scales are invoked through our emotional experiences and with what implications? How are different power structures embedded in the requirements, practices, successes, and failures of emotional management? Our discussion highlights how emotional masking and spill-outs are tools to navigate the emotional terrain of the neoliberalized academy. We conclude that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring can unsettle the structural hierarchies that require a “masking” of feelings for the sake of professional distance.     

A space for feminist mentoring: the role of Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group in higher education

Abstract

Higher education and organizations within academic disciplines are important spaces for mentoring and other forms of networking. These spaces, however, are often situated in environments that limit equitable and inclusive opportunities for early career and underrepresented scholars to effectively engage in mentoring. This paper contributes to critical feminist scholarship that examines how organizations in higher education can offer supportive mentoring spaces for women, early career faculty, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. The analysis focuses on the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) as a space for faculty, students and other geographers to enhance their professional and personal success. Our analysis draws from the results of an international survey, a focus group discussion, and reflexive participation of feminist geographers aligned with this specialty group. We examine the ways in which this academic organization, and the informal and formal networks it cultivates, attempts to foster an anti-oppressive mentoring community of feminist geographers. We also analyze how these networks are shaped by and embedded in neoliberal institutions in the discipline of geography and higher education as a whole. This discussion offers important insights to growing research and initiatives that support mentoring for women, feminists, and others concerned with building more inclusive and socially just spaces in academia.     

A love story: for ‘Buddy System’ research in the academy

This article makes a case for a ‘buddy system’ approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of ‘caring with’ our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about ‘doing’ research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.     

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.     

Vibrant mentoring landscapes in feminist geography

Abstract

Building on the feminist geography tradition of mentoring, in this brief introduction, I advance a vision of vibrant mentoring landscapes that are alive with difference and that continually renew the discipline. The diverse contributions to this themed issue approach questions around mentoring from a variety of perspectives and positionalities, including: gender, national origin, racialized identity, sexuality, career stage, life stage, parenting status, scale, geography, and type of educational institution. Some articles divulge personal experiences while others focus on roles that mentors play within a continuum of change versus stasis in institutions of higher education. Of particular note is a call to those with relative privilege to engage self-reflexively with the ways in which one may become more accessible to those who are structurally oppressed. Anything less than a truly diverse mentoring landscape within feminist geography impoverishes us collectively as well as the knowledge we produce.     

Composing our careers: Susan Hanson's contributions to geography and geographers

Susan Hanson's career exemplifies the notion that our lives are compositions rather than predictable, linear trajectories. In this essay I argue that Susan's career is an empowering example of a collage of woven-together life experiences, substantive research interests, feminist values and progressive professional practices. I illustrate these ideas through three compositions that I trace throughout Susan's career: networking gender; caring geography; and reproducing geography. Susan's work connects and validates the diverse elements of our lives through her scholarship, her commitment to feminist values and her disciplinary leadership.     

Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond

Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.     

国内外女性主义地理学研究述评

后现代思潮背景下,性别研究在人文科学领域越来越重要。性别不只是关于个体身份的自然属性,更是一种映射社会变革、社会不平等和反抗特权的社会关系。本文梳理国内外女性主义研究的相关文献,具体从女性主义地理学理论渊源、西方女性主义地理学和中国本土女性主义地理学等三方面对女性主义地理研究进行综述。较之于国外同行,国内女性主义地理学研究仍显单薄,多数是采借和沿袭西方的相关理论进而通过特定案例加以印证（佐证）,某种意义上是对西方同行的回应性研究。未来的我国女性主义地理研究,需要关注三个问题：从我国传统文化女性发展理论中吸取营养;聚焦女性日常生活世界领域的实践逻辑;女性作为能动者的个体和自组织的集体智慧需要引起注意。     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.     

Collaboration as feminist strategy

I discuss my collaboration with Susan Hanson, which spanned a decade, culminating in our book, Gender, Work and Space. I focus on the productivity of our research collaboration. It led us to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and economic geography and feminist cultural theory, in ways that allowed us to find an audience amongst, not only feminist geographers but also non-feminist political economists and planners. Our collaboration involved a large number of research assistants as well, and though this kind of collaboration is typically hidden in most research accounts, these research assistants were active producers of survey data. I consider this, as well as how they helped us to localize and situate our knowledge claims. Finally, I highlight the support that comes from a feminist collaboration.     

The contested meanings of home for women caring for children with long-term care needs in Ontario,Canada

Home as a place of caring is theorized using the literature from geography, sociology, housing and feminist studies. To support our theorization, grounded theory is used to capture and interpret the experiences of women caring for children with long-term care needs in the home. Eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with women in Ontario, Canada uncovered differences in the way the women perceived their homes and highlighted their multiple and complex experiences. The findings revealed three key issues. First, women do not want their homes to be completely defined by long-term care activities as many other types of activities are situated in their homes. Second, long-term care activities and schedules are not segregated but become deeply embedded and enmeshed within the spatial and temporal practices and processes of family life. Third, the meanings, characteristics and ideal of ‘home’ portrayed in popular culture and the academic literature often clashed with what the women experienced on a daily basis. Analysis revealed the tensions surrounding ‘reconstructing spaces in the home’ and ‘the home as a private and public place’ which are indicative of the women's struggles with the disjuncture between the ideal and lived home. The women's experiences challenge us to consider new ways of theorizing the home, and the home when it is a place where long-term care is provided.     

Generative spaces of gender and feminist geography in Singapore: entanglements of the personal and political

Abstract

While geographers’ work in Southeast Asia has yet to engage substantively with theoretical developments in gender/feminist studies generated by Anglo-American academic centers, we argue that Singapore has proven to be somewhat of an exception. Focusing on the National University of Singapore, this article discusses how the development of gender and feminist geography in Singapore has benefitted from being able to engage with international debates in feminism through the country’s and NUS’ internationalization efforts, and working in the English language. Using the notion of generative spaces, we highlight first, the importance of using our teaching to engage in feminist activism to encourage feminist change in the classroom, as well as within our immediate communities and further afield; and second, the nascent yet significant contributions of feminist geographers based in Singapore to feminist theorization from and about the Global South.     

‘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.     

Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social laboratories

The insights of feminist science and technology studies (STS) into the constructed and situated nature of knowledge have proved crucial to informing feminist geography. Since the rise of emotional geographies, feminist methodologies no longer simply reflect on questions of positionality, partiality, and power relations, but also on the role of emotions in the field. In this article, we argue that a feminist STS perspective has much to offer when thinking about the way emotions are engineered, controlled, and negotiated in research processes. Our engagement with what we call ‘social laboratories’ – i.e., spaces in everyday life where (experimental) research is conducted with human beings – advances debates in feminist geography, as these laboratories crystallize the emotional entanglements feminists encounter in the field. Looking at economic experiments in Ghana and fertility clinics in Mexico, we discuss the difficulties of doing feminist fieldwork in these experimental research spaces. We argue that the constant negotiation of emotions and ethics is crucial to access, assess, and do fieldwork in research settings that do not adhere to feminist ideals, but nevertheless have gendered effects on women's and men's lives. Rethinking ‘the place of emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005, in Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246, Aldershot: Ashgate) through social laboratories forges instructive links across feminist/emotional geographies and social studies of science.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

'Are we there yet?' feminist political geographies

Our purpose in this paper is to chart the increasing and diffuse importance of feminist scholarship to political geography. We argue that feminist geographers have spatialized multiple forms of the political, rather than simply offering a singular feminist perspective to the literature. To canvas that breadth we suggest three distinct (albeit obviously related) takes on the political in feminist political geography: the distributive, the antagonistic, and the constitutive. This framework showcases the impressive breadth of feminist political geography and perhaps works against a sense of marginality that stems from such diffuseness. We illustrate our argument with particular reference to research that has appeared in Gender, Place and Culture over the past decade.