Time and Care in the “Lab” and the “Field”: Slow Mentoring and Feminist Research in Geography

Abstract

abstractBuilding on calls for “slow scholarship,” we highlight the importance of time and care in producing rigorous, ethical research through our advising practices. We describe how feminist ethics and epistemologies shape each of our research clusters: the Hydro-Feminist Lab at West Virginia University and the Feminist Geography Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. We show a couple of ways that feminist geographers can adopt the “lab model” and use it to build meaningful mentoring networks, fostered through time and care, and in a way that both meets and transgresses the demands of academic neoliberalism. We then show how this approach extends into our fieldwork, recounting instances where the importance of mentoring through a caring ethic emerged. Unfolding over weeks, months, and years we show the value of time and care, both in deepening the quality of advising relationships and in creating mentoring relationships of trust and support. We contend that this better prepares students for the intellectual and emotional challenges of feminist research and, in turn, strengthens that research. In the face of neoliberalism’s quickening drives, we highlight the benefits and the contradictions of this kind of slow and caring “lab-field” feminist mentoring for geographic research.