Communities of Inclusion and Exclusion in Mentoring: Who Has the Legitimacy to Speak Truth, or Truth in Relation to Power/Knowledge in the Academy?

• In Event: 70.033 - Reciprocal Mentoring for Critical, Activist Scholarship

Abstract

As a young female faculty member in a critically-oriented education department, it was exciting to participate in mentoring relationships that allowed my, then, young scholarly ideas to emerge; I attempted to mentor my own students in similar ways, but found most excitement in our reciprocal teaching-learning processes.

This paper uses feminist, post-structural, and postcolonial frameworks to examine the academy when it uses community to open spaces for new scholarship and interrogates and breaks apart knowledge/power relations at the same time. I also examine gender, age, race, class, and national discourses that have been used to include and, at the same time, exclude new truths/actions in academic research. In our work, we have found new ways to think of knowledge, act on knowledge, do critical research, and the necessity of engaging in activist research. I focus on social inclusion and exclusion as two sides of a “coin,” including an analysis of the U.S. academy as a colonial, largely male cultural- historical institution that still has openings for new ideas and actions. However, due to increased competitiveness, and reductions of resources, there is less space for the collective or “community” of supportive scholars. Nonetheless, the critical activism and research of my “memory” has been co-constructed within micro-political and social communities that, happily, include most members of this panel.

Objectives
Primary objective: illustrating communities of inclusion and exclusion that are simultaneously active and acting in the neoliberal academy today, and the academy of “yesterday.” Second objective: showing ways in which micropolitical communities of critical scholars can act across time and space to support each other, to learn and share, to resist and construct.

Framework
The paper draws from Foucault’s (1980, 1991) notions of power/knowledge and governing discourses, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. It uses feminist scholarship including Ellsworth (1989) and Butler (1993).

Methods, Techniques or Modes of Inquiry
This is part of a critical personal narrative (Mutua & author, 2004) that includes critically-interrogated memories and observations of my own and others’ discursively situated “experiences” in higher education.

Data Sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
Critical personal narratives help to decolonize research, opening up new ways of speaking, interrogating, and reconceptualizing knowledge/power relations. Critical personal narrative allows me to recount and analyze situated “events” and “experiences” as a selection of memories that illustrate the importance of reciprocal mentoring in the academy, and in global/local networks of scholars.

Results and Points of View
While the “academy” has shifted over the years, micro-communities of scholars engage in reciprocal mentoring activities, in both inclusionary and exclusionary ways throughout the academy. Nonetheless, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest, there are openings, and lines of flight even when the serpent is ever present.

Scholarly Significance
The importance of this paper and the session is to explore ways in which reciprocal mentoring in larger and smaller spaces helps to support senior as well as junior scholars, while also—at the same time—opening new spaces for critical dialogue, research and action.

Author

• Marianne N. Bloch, University of Wisconsin - Madison