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.     

General practice access in regional and remote Australia for ageing populations

Identifying and removing access barriers to the timely provision of comprehensive health care is increasingly important for the wellbeing of Australia's rapidly ageing and frail populations, particularly those in non‐metropolitan settings. This study has examined if current general practice (GP) locations in non‐metropolitan South Australia (SA) and Western Australia (WA) are geographically accessible to the rapidly growing frail and prefrail populations known to have a high level of health service use and reduced mobility. Geospatial analysis linking 60‐kilometre GP service catchments, 2016 population counts, and 2027 population projections has estimated that the size of the frail and prefrail population that live outside these GP service catchments will double, reaching 7,800 people by 2027. The maldistribution of GP locations was most evident in WA. As regional and remote populations continue to age, the challenge of health service provision, including geographic access to care, must be resolved to ensure that populations in these areas have the best opportunity to age well. Geospatial methods linking service and demographic information, such as the approach used in this analysis, can aid in planning the equitable provision of health care for older Australians.