“Wakey, wakey, biatch!”: Spooky’s Lessons on Critical Mentorship

• In Event: “Bad Mentor”: Community Perceptions of “Qualified” Mentors in the Tower and the Block

Abstract

In this qualitative paper, I ask, “What constitutes a ‘bad’ mentor, and how can ‘bad mentorship’ benefit at-promise youth?” I employ Visual-Verbal Video Analysis (VVVA), which Fazeli and colleagues (2023) call a ‘multilayered, qualitative approach to content analysis… [to identify] distinct analytical principles particular to video data that support an in-depth and interpretive analysis of both verbal and visual content’ (p. 4). Data sources include 31 episodes and 25 specific scenes that include the character Spooky from all four seasons of On My Block (Lungerich et al., 2018-2021) produced by Netflix. By centering Spooky, a known gang-leader with a criminal history, as a mentor to at-promise youth, On My Block flips the script on socially perceived qualities of mentors.

Author

• Robin Brandehoff, University of Colorado - Denver