Surviving the First Time Through: A New Instructor's Views on Designing and Teaching Economic Geography and how Mentoring Early-Career Faculty Can Help

This article presents the reflections of a new instructor of economic geography in the USA. The author offers practical advice for designing and delivering a course for the first time. Suggestions are given in support of the view that sharing knowledge of effective teaching practices is an important component of mentoring early-career faculty. By producing and publishing practical examples of teaching materials, experienced faculty may assist novice instructors in balancing time spent on teaching and research. The author encourages economic geographers to contribute to the health of the sub-discipline by supporting new faculty in this manner.     

‘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.     

Improving the transition to university: introducing student voices into the formal induction process for new geography undergraduates

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the area of school to university transitions within geography. This article focuses upon one aspect of these transitions, namely the induction programmes offered by universities to their new undergraduates. It argues in favour of extending the length of the induction period currently offered by many institutions and incorporating student voices into the induction process through peer mentoring. In making this argument, the article reports upon the new Extended Induction to Geography programme that Newcastle University piloted for the first time in 2011–2012.     

Flourishing in fragile academic work spaces and learning environments: feminist geographies of care and mentoring

In this article we discuss the ways in which a feminist ethos of care and the associated practice of mentoring allows feminist geography to flourish in teaching, working and learning spaces. We argue that our working relationship – based on care, mentoring and friendship – is crucial in order to survive and deflect structural inequalities. Our working relationship spans across undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate and early career stages at a single university. We offer our personal stories as examples of establishing and maintaining collaborative mentoring and caring work relationships. Further, our commitment to a feminist ethos of care and mentoring is vital for our selfcare and causes trouble for structural power differentials. First, we share stories about how our working relationship began and developed within the critical, caring and fragile spaces of the Geography Programme at the University of Waikato and other feminist geography networks. Second, literature on care, mentoring and collaboration is discussed, with a focus on feminist politics of mentoring and collaboration. Third, we return to our own experiences to illustrate the ways embodied and emotional subjectivities and associated power dynamics shape mentoring and care relationships. Examples of joint supervision and research are offered to illustrate complex sets of spatially significant emotions, feelings and subjectivities. Finally, we highlight the ways in which place matters if feminist geography is to flourish.     

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.     

A feminist geographer in a strange land: building bridges through informal mentoring in Switzerland

Abstract

This article is a narrative representation of a personal experience as an early career feminist woman in the French-speaking Swiss context. After highlighting the androcentric tradition in Swiss academia, and the still-prevalent glass ceiling for young female scholars, this article aims to explore the survival mechanisms women use among themselves when up against a pervasive old boys’ club. Using a reflexive approach, this article illustrates how informal mechanisms can support early career women academics. Despite the lack of either feminist or gender geography programs and departments in Western Switzerland, this article highlights the presence of feminist practices in the everyday life of academia. Numerous collaborative practices are encountered at different career levels, and in different sites. While the bias of such practice is acknowledged, relying on individuals more than on institutionalised practices, the article aims to understand the workings of female solidarity networks better. It calls for a recognition of their role in women’s career progression and for the implementation of a culture of informal mentoring within academia. Finally, by more fully recognising such practices, it calls for the use of mentoring as a feminist tool to create a more inclusive academia, promoting an ethic of care that aims to challenge the masculinism and elitism of the neoliberal university.     

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.     

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.     

Interpreting for the Afghanistan Spanish Force

The participation of interpreters as linguistic and cultural mediators is considered essential to the success of military operations in a foreign country. This study examines the situation of two categories of civilian interpreters who worked for the Spanish armed forces in Afghanistan: interpreters recruited in Spain and interpreters recruited in Afghanistan. The distinct positionalities of these groups of interpreters emerge as a recurring theme in the interviews carried out as part of this research. The findings indicate that the interpreter’s positionality impacted the interpreter’s agency, the trust placed in him or her by the armed forces, and exposure to danger. In highlighting interpreters’ active participation in the communicative situation, this paper increases understanding of the positionality of interpreters in war zones.     

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.