Mentoring in Academia: Healing Our Wounds to Foster Justice

The Issue with Status-Quo Mentorship

While mentorship can be a very positive experience, it also exists within multiple systems of oppression. Without intentional awareness, mentorship can easily perpetuate the cycles of harm within those systems.

Academia operates as a hierarchy — a system where people are ranked based on status or authority. This creates a power imbalance between mentors and mentees in addition to the imbalance in responsibility and knowledge exchange.

Mentorship is not part of the academic curriculum: we learn how to mentor from our mentors. If we experience harm as mentees and cannot heal, chances are that the people we mentor will inherit that pain. Healing, though, can be messy: not only because of the painful experiences we must revisit but the grief that comes with realizing it did not have to be that way. In a space that prioritizes productivity over humanity, mentoring can be a venue to recenter our humanity.

Our Responsibility as Mentors

A necessary step for creating mutually nurturing and compassionate mentoring relationships is realizing how we perpetuate the same harm we have experienced.

“Well, my mentor / research advisor / professor did it this way.”

“It was way worse when I was a student.”

We might have heard these justifications for abuses of power, or we may have said something similar ourselves. However, these statements fail to acknowledge our personal responsibility to be better mentors.

Aside from career status, mentors have power based on their positionality — the social and political context that creates our identities regarding race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. It can be challenging to accept when we hold power because many of us, especially those with colonially marginalized identities, see power as inherently dangerous and a means to oppress others. Because of that stigma, we may default to meeting that power with shame and guilt. But denying the power we hold can cause real harm: either by steamrolling mentees or not leveraging our power for their benefit.

So what do we do instead? As Dolly Chugh put it, the first step is to “figure out the parts of [our] identities we think about the least” to create awareness of our power and privilege. For example, I am a queer disabled person, which disadvantages me in a straight-dominant and ableist society. With English as my first language though, I never have to think about being able to communicate in the English-dominant US. Once we contextualize our identities, we can start learning about the experiences of people with different identities without centering ourselves. This can give us new insight into how we interact with other people. (You can learn more about privilege, power, and positionality here).

Can Things Change?

Heck yeah! How we treat others is a reflection of how we treat ourselves, which we learn from how others treated us in the past. When we meet all the parts of ourselves with compassion, we can use our power to foster justice. When we treat ourselves with kindness and respect, we can treat mentees with that same energy. When we acknowledge our agency, we can do that for others.

For instance, the mentors who claimed they had no power to help me navigate academic issues were also the ones who felt comfortable making career decisions on my behalf. But one of the best mentors I’ve had not only taught me how to take research notes, but also how to get the services I needed for my disabilities. I could get testing and transport accommodations without her being directly involved, which was empowering. Even today, I use her tips whenever I need to call doctors or customer service lines. It’s through acts like this that we can leverage our power in a way that allows others to claim their own.

Activist Toni Cade Bambara said “If your house ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here.” We all want to be a part of a big revolution in academia, and that big revolution starts within us.

Toward Empowered Mentoring

At Movement Consulting, we believe that mentorship is more than just a mechanism to expand our networks and resumes. It can be a way for folks at all career stages to care for each other and honor their humanity. That’s why we developed Intent to Impact: A 12-Week Course to Foster Genuine Relation in Academia Through Mentorship. This is not your average Mentoring 101 course. It is a transformative and communal journey.

From contextualizing systemic oppression to radical reinvention, our peer-coaches aid in creating a space for everyone to learn and express themselves without judgment. Through the dismantling of shame and guilt, we can practice radical vulnerability. That means we get to show up in our communities as our whole, authentic selves, something that is often missing in academic spaces.

Our positionalities are not just our identities, they are the lens we use to understand and navigate the world. Expanding this lens to include the experiential knowledge of others is another key aspect of creating nurturing relationships that foster justice. Together we can reimagine anything, but let’s start with mentoring.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this! Interested in radically reimaging mentorship? Sign up for our Intent to Impact course here.