Feminist Mentoring Research Articles

How Doctoral Chicanas Resist White Supremacist Political Erasure Through Muxerista Mentoring

Latinas in graduate education remain underrepresented as doctoral recipients. During 2014-15, only 7.3 percent of Latinas had received doctoral degrees compared to White (66.7%), Asian (12.7%), and Black (10.3%) women (National Center of Education Statistics 2016). Latina students experience the doctoral socialization process of cultural dissonance, which conflicts with their own ethnic or racial identity. As doctoral Chicanas, we resist academia’s values of “individualism, competition, and emotional detachment” (Ibarra 2001, 101). During an isolating COVID-19 pandemic and a white supremacist political climate, we have managed to persevere against the odds. We have informally developed the process of Muxerista mentoring (Revilla 2004) by coming together to plan the annual MAS K-12 training program. We share our multi-generational testimonios to explore the multiple worlds we navigate while in our programs as nontraditional Chicanas learning and teaching in higher education. We argue that Muxerista mentorship is a genuine reciprocal connection and a commitment to building critical conciencia and collective transformation. Creating a Chicana feminist mentoring space that honors and values our unique experiences navigating a eurocentric education system. Through testimonio, we tease out our survival strategies and what nurtures our vision as activist scholars.

Making Waves in Academia: Asian/Asian American Feminist Mentoring as Activism

Multicultural Feminist Mentoring (MFM) models have provided an important foundation to address the further need for conceptualizing a mentoring model that is specific to Asian/Asian American (A/AA) experiences. In this collaborative autoethnography, six researchers in three mentor-mentee dyads explored what it means to pursue Asian/Asian American feminist mentoring (A/AAFM), through dyadic and group interactive dialogues and collaborative analysis. A/AAFM can be conceptualized as anti-racist praxis, where each mentor attempted to consider mentoring as activism within academia, being grounded in values stemming from A/AA experiences and feminism. Results yielded a model of A/AAFM which emphasizes a convergence of multifaceted racial and cultural identities, feminist values, and activism. Three specific processes emerged: being holistic, relational, and mutual; a focus on community and intergenerational generosity; and intentional flattening of the power hierarchy. Implications for training and activism are discussed.

The Contradictions and Challenges of Feminist Mentoring

The Contradictions and Challenges of Feminist Mentoring

Women, work, and opportunities: From neoliberal to feminist mentoring

AbstractWomen‐focused mentoring programs are often cited as an important tool to help address gender inequality at work. Despite their popularity, there remain questions about how useful they are at improving women’s career trajectories or transforming gender demographics at the organizational or industry level. A frequent critique of current women‐focused mentoring efforts is that they reflect and uphold neoliberal feminism and have shifted from collective support to an individualized focus on competition and accruing human and social capital. These programs encourage women to internalize neoliberal subjectivities and prescribe individual change while shoring up ideas about meritocracy that are utterly divorced from gender. I discuss how feminist mentoring, which takes central tenets of feminism including focusing on collective action and organizational change, can serve as a countermeasure to neoliberal feminism and how this form of mentorship can help address gender inequality at work.

Supporting Students in Health Service Psychology Training: A Theory-Driven Approach to Meeting the Diverse Needs of Trainees.

The demographic characteristics of health service psychology (HSP) trainees have shifted considerably in recent decades. In what was previously a field comprised predominantly of White men, HSP trainees today represent a much broader range of backgrounds. Nonetheless, the leadership within HSP training (e.g., faculty) remains relatively homogenous, and the training approaches (e.g., mentorship styles, expectations for students) may have failed to evolve to meet the needs of this more diverse pool of trainees. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the training needs of students who represent an array of diverse backgrounds, identities, and life experiences may not be met by existing conceptualizations of and approaches to training. In this article, we discuss several training issues that are specific to a range of trainees, including women, trainees who are parents, sexual/gender minoritized trainees, trainees with disabilities, and trainees from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. We draw from social-ecological and feminist mentoring theories to provide recommendations, consistent with APA's (2018) Standards of Accreditation for HSP Doctoral Programs in order to offer recommendations for optimizing the training experiences of HSP trainees across multiple levels of analysis.

“PUTTING YOUR POWER ON THE LINE”: TOWARD EMBODIED ALLYSHIP IN MENTOR-MENTEE AND PEER RELATIONSHIPS

Although relational and multicultural feminist mentoring models have interrogated the role of relationships and power in graduate mentor-mentee relationships, less work has examined graduate student mentoring within psychology in the context of social justice and equity goals, and the processes by which ally and accomplice actions might emerge in doctoral mentoring and peer relationships, in particular. Using Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE), we examined the ways that doctoral mentors, mentees, and peers navigate power, privilege, and allyship in the academy, and how relationships and ally actions are connected. Our data was generated through individual autoethnographic writing and subsequent dialogue among the four authors. Qualitative analyses generated three action-oriented themes that illustrate a mutually constituted and interactive process by which we, as collaborators, strive for allyship within the confines of the academic status quo, and where resistance, authenticity, and identity-affirming relationships are integral to equity-based action and change.

Does mentoring for young women introduce a feminist approach? A scoping review

Although mentoring for young people at risk of social exclusion is a widespread educational intervention strategy, little research has been conducted on mentoring for young women aimed at eradicating gender inequalities. This article examines the existing scientific literature on mentoring for young women by means of a scoping review. A total of 1,256 studies were compiled from six specialized databases. Of these, 21 papers were selected and analyzed in depth, three of which are defined by the authors as feminist mentoring (Femtoring). Our analysis served to identify the main characteristics of mentoring programs for young women and the implications of the feminist perspective at the socio-educational level. Furthermore, reflective tools are provided on the empowerment processes stemming from a feminist approach to mentoring programs.

Redefining the Work of Feminist Praxis: Making Space for a (Rebellious) Undergraduate Feminist Research Group

ABSTRACT This article traces the practices and outcomes of an undergraduate research group that began organically to foster research and activist collaborations in a small group setting and without the rubric of a structured course, formal lab setting, or formal institutional backing. We consider several outcomes of this group: (1) Graduate school entry and preparation for graduate school; (2) The importance of feminist friendships and feminist community among students; (3) The fusion between scholar/activist identities, with clear emphasis on de-centering whiteness, challenging patriarchy, and undermining homophobia and transphobia; and (4) The investment in mentoring and nurturing relationships with students across race, class, gender, and sexual identity lines. In particular, we argue that students of color, gender queer/trans/LGBT students, and students from working class backgrounds are especially served by such models of mentoring and community, particularly as feminist mentoring can contribute to the work of social justice for underprivileged students.

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

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.

Culture and Positionality: Academy and Mentorship

Literature suggests that mentors play a unique role in individuals’ personal and career development. In this article, I highlight how a feminist mentoring style has influenced my academic and professional journey from student to Full Professor, as I have assumed leadership roles at my university and nationally. Using theory and research as a backdrop, I explore how my multiple identities–international student, immigrant, women, Asian Indian-intersect with mentoring relationships, institutional norms, and choices I have made and realizations I had when seeking guidance. My article concludes with lessons learned and how I have applied these in my mentorship with others.

A space for feminist mentoring: the role of Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group in higher education

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.

‘Will you be my mentor?’ Feminist mentoring at mid-career for institutional change

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.

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

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.

Emotional masking and spill-outs in the neoliberalized university: a feminist geographic perspective on mentorship

This paper addresses the emotional dimensions of academic mentorship from a student mentee perspective and contributes to an emerging literature on geographies of emotion in higher education. It presents a pedagogical practice of self-reflexive co-mentorship – self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring – and deploys it methodologically to analyze three biographical narratives. From different student mentee vantage points, these narratives reveal how the scales of the body, the family, and the nation are interwoven within the geopolitical and manifest within mentoring relationships. We argue that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentorship allows people at different academic career stages to share personal experiences of navigating the academy as a means to challenge institutional systems of power. Our argument answers three questions: How and why do we express and manage our emotions in mentoring relationships? What spatial scales are invoked through our emotional experiences and with what implications? How are different power structures embedded in the requirements, practices, successes, and failures of emotional management? Our discussion highlights how emotional masking and spill-outs are tools to navigate the emotional terrain of the neoliberalized academy. We conclude that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring can unsettle the structural hierarchies that require a “masking” of feelings for the sake of professional distance.

Conversation and Voice: Feminist Mentoring for Social and Political Change

Although women have studied and written about their positions in the academy forsome time, it is only through ground-breaking work of Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M.,Goldberger, N. R. & Tarule, J. M. (1986), that we have formally acknowledged thatwomen learn, construct, and process knowledge and events differently from men.They determined that women learned in relation to one another, that collaborativelearning superseded competition, and that females perceived teaching and learningin relation to self. That research in turn has led to further understandings of poweræ power in relation to what is valued as the legitimate construction of knowledgeand what is valued as knowledge per se. Campbell (1997), Gore (1993), Lewis(1993) and others have commented articulately on the need to view women'seducation as different in one way or another, yet recognize that such apperception,if accepted, concomitantly supposes a shift in power relations

Towards mentoring as feminist praxis in early childhood education and care in England

Following our contribution to a study of mentoring in seven European countries, we explored epistemological and ontological inconsistencies within mainstream mentoring systems and their regulated practice in England. We considered how feminist mentoring praxis can unsettle conceptualisations of mentoring relationships and challenge inequity in the early education systems and the practice of teaching young children. Predominantly female, early childhood educators suffer from low status in England, and their working lives may be controlled and policed through inequitable systems. On entering the workforce, trainees encounter a reductionist policy milieu where mentoring structures and normative assessment arrangements contribute to inequity. Mentors play pivotal roles in inducting trainees into their worlds of work with young children. Mentoring relationships can determine whether trainees accept the status quo. Principles derived from feminist praxis enable mentors to practise an ‘engaged pedagogy’, co-constructing knowledge, subverting hierarchies and contesting taken-for-granted aspects of policy and practice.

Asserting the Right to Belong: Feminist Co-Mentoring among Graduate Student Women

This empirical case study aims to identify how graduate student women mentor each other when tutoring writing and, through doing so, assert their right to belong in the academy. Much existing literature on feminist mentoring emphasizes the need for better mentoring for women, whether in work or school environments, in current or future faculty positions (see, e.g., Bona, Rinehart, and Volbrecht; Darwin; Eble and Gaillet; Enos; Fishman and Lunsford; Goeke et al.). Across the literature, there is also attention to the role that peer mentoring or co-mentoring plays in providing support for women in higher education. Jennifer Goeke et al., for instance, have shown the importance of peer mentoring among junior faculty for achieving both scholarly productivity and work/life balance. Lori D. Patton has documented that peer mentoring among African American women provides a range of benefits, including “sharing information with friends, writing and studying together, seeking advice, and simply enjoying conversations with a person they could trust” (529). And in reflecting on their own relationship, Gail M. McGuire and Jo Reger have argued that reciprocal co-mentoring provides encouragement through shared success, allows individuals to pool knowledge and resources, and makes a space for sharing doubts about academia (62–63). While this literature suggests the value of mentoring, particularly feminist co-mentoring, it also indicates a need to understand better the nature of these collaborations. Specifically: what does feminist co-mentoring look like in practice? What interactional and relational work is involved when graduate student women mentor each other? Toward answering these large but central questions, we use the method and theory of applied conversation analysis (CA), which allows us to present and closely analyze a case study based on videotaped interactions of two graduate student women of color who met weekly in a campus writing center over several months. This case was recorded as part of a larger study that involved videotaping writing conferences and interviewing writers and tutors about their ongoing relationships and work together. Though the case study participants never explicitly name

Reflections on Becoming Feminist Therapists: Honoring Our Feminist Mentors

A dearth of literature on feminist clinical mentorship exists. Seldom is one afforded the opportunity to trace one's developmental roots as a feminist, reflect on the process of becoming a feminist-informed clinician, and to express gratitude and appreciation for those feminists who acted as mentors and/or influenced one's development as a feminist clinician. In this piece we discuss our experiences of feminist clinical mentoring and honor our feminist mentors and/or influences. We explore our feminist roots through the tracing of our intergenerational feminist mentoring tree and discuss the profound effect that the mentoring relationship had on the development of our professional and personal identities.

An application of attachment theory: mentoring relationship dynamics and ethical concerns

A portion of this article was presented in August 2006 in E.N. Williams (Chair), Feminist mentoring: Where the personal meets the political, a symposium conducted at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, LA. The author thanks Susana Blanco of SUNY Albany for her contributions to that presentation and her comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Feminist Mentoring and Female Graduate Student Success: Challenging Gender Inequality in Higher Education

AbstractThere has been much research on gender inequality in higher education and the benefits of mentoring. However, since mentoring has been a predominantly male experience, most research with female students focuses on advising relationships. For women, there is a significant difference between experiences of advising and mentoring with problematic effects for them. Attrition rates are high for both men and women but the causes of female attrition are unique and possibly related to their mentoring experiences. Mentoring remains largely an informal activity in most graduate departments, and due to the patriarchal nature of graduate education, it has been a predominantly male experience (Lovitts 2001). In this paper, I provide an overview of the different types of advising/mentoring relationships for women in doctoral programs and the benefits of these for them. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications for graduate departments, suggestions for future research, and a call for developing and implementing feminist models of mentoring for all graduate students.