Mentoring early career women geographers in the neoliberal academy: dialogue, reflexivity, and ethics of care

Abstract

ABSTRACTFaculty mentoring is a critical part of career advancement in higher education. Programmes that provide mentoring for early career scholars, especially women and underrepresented faculty members, are shown to support and improve the success rate of both faculty and their universities. This paper examines the challenges and rewards of mentoring women faculty from a feminist geographical perspective. Mentoring is often situated in hierarchical and masculinist structures and neoliberal environments of higher education in which expectations are stacked against women and underrepresented faculty. This analysis contributes to the mentoring literature by examining mentoring from a feminist perspective, including attention to the principles of dialogue, reflexivity, and ethics of care, and providing strategies of resistance to support successful mentoring. Our research focuses on a mentoring model with an advanced and an early career women faculty member located at two different institutions in the U.S. This research is grounded in autoethnography as a way to support and build on the role of transparency about expectations, personal and professional reward systems, and logistics in this relationship. We conclude that feminist mentoring entails critical engagement with the experiences of faculty in the neoliberal academy in order to develop sustainable and supportive mentoring.