The project of self, the project of others: mentoring, women and the fashioning of the academic subject

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Mentoring has become a popular form of staff development for women at Australian and New Zealand universities, with a number now running some form of initiative. Improved access to mentoring, it is argued, enhances the career prospects of women, and leads to an increase in the number of women in senior positions. For this reason mentoring programmes are widely supported by women in universities at all levels. However, despite the widespread introduction of mentoring initiatives, and a substantial international literature on mentoring programmes and benefits, the processes of mentoring are largely under‐theorized. In late 2002 the author interviewed 17 Australian women academics about their academic lives and their experiences of mentoring. This paper draws on one of those interviews with ‘Karen’ to investigate how academic women construct identities through mentoring. In her engagement with discourses of academic careers and mentoring, Karen moves constantly between two key subject positions—the position of the active subject, developing herself through mentoring as a suitable academic subject for the times. The second is the position of one who is ‘taken on board’ and acted upon by others through mentoring. The author suggests that these two, on the face of it, contradictory subject positions sit alongside one another in a theorization of mentoring. Further, these two elements are necessarily present in mentoring, in that mentoring requires an active subject, whilst also embodying a desire to be acted upon by others. Through the uptake and practices of mentoring, women academics self‐regulate to develop the appropriate attitudes and dispositions required of academics in contemporary universities. This analysis has implications for how we understand mentoring for the professional development of women academics, and its place as a vehicle for generating more inclusive institutional cultures for women in universities.