Advisor–advisee feminist relational mentoring: A heartfelt autoethnographic conversation

Abstract

AbstractAcademia is frequently a hostile place where students, pre‐tenure scholars, women, people of color, disabled, queer, transgender, and nonbinary people face perpetual challenges. “You do not belong here” or “you are not good enough” can feel like a constant refrain. Yet some students find their path and pursue their graduate studies with determination, or even passion, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. A successful mentoring relationship with a faculty member can contribute to that success. This article tells the story of how two very differently positioned women in academia forged a unique mentoring relationship that produced unexpected and positive outcomes. One measure of this relationship's success is the student's transformation from hesitant master's student to confident doctoral student pursuing a self‐designed multidisciplinary doctoral degree. Less tangibly but no less important, the increasingly reciprocal and horizontal nature of this mentoring relationship allowed both parties to take risks in their academic lives and to step into more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the academy. In this article we, a white American tenured faculty advisor and a Saudi‐American Muslim woman PhD advisee, trace some of the key turning points in this advising story through a duo‐autoethnographic (duoethnography: a collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers juxtapose their life histories in order to provide multiple understandings of a social phenomenon) dialogue. We relay how our mentoring relationship allowed each of us to transcend our scripted academic roles and fostered an enabling environment for doctoral study and risky scholarship. We acknowledge that mentoring is not a one‐size‐fits‐all approach, yet we hope that by highlighting some dimensions of our relationship we might inform others seeking a feminist, relational, horizontal, supportive model for academic mentoring.