Formal Mentoring Programs as Sites of Resistance

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

“We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community,” bell hooks wrote in 1994. Thirty years later, her words mark this present conjuncture with prescient clarity. With the powers that be “committed to maintaining systems of domination,” how do we maintain a “practice of freedom” within or around the University? How do we continue to develop and support teachers, scholars, and leaders by leveraging our resources or rerouting our energies?

This professional development panel explores how formal mentoring programs can support underrepresented scholars and create space for them to live and work freely. Representing the Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program, Crossing Latinidades, Ford Fellows mentorship, and the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement (SITPA), panelists will discuss how the programs prepare participants to navigate and challenge the systems we are embedded in. In the face of the “accelerating devolution” of higher education, such as attacks on DEI, shrinking federal funding, transphobic spaces, and the threat to undocumented students and “birthright citizens,” we’ll consider the benefits and limitations of looking to university-sponsored programs as sites of care, community, and resistance.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Summer L Hamilton, Independent Scholar

Panelists

• Lauren Barnes, Penn State

• Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University

• Jennifer A Gonzalez, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Bianet Castellanos, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Biographical Information

Lauren Barnes is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State University pursuing a dual-title Ph.D. in English and African American and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow at the Center for Black Digital Research, serving as a #DigBlk Scholar. Her research interests center on methodologies for archive-building that re-examine a range of Black voices and perspectives. Her current project focuses on how language mediates identity in relation to issues of race, gender, and place at the intersections of African American and Caribbean literary traditions, African diasporic contexts, and Latina/o Studies.

M. Bianet Castellanos is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of American Studies and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her latest book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2021), analyzes how Maya families make sense of the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution. It was awarded the Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Arthur Rubel Book Prize, and Edward Bruner Book Prize, and was a finalist for the 2023 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize. Her new research examines settler colonialism in western Mexico and the cultural politics of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican migrations and displacements in this region. She is a member of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities Working Group, the INRS Dialog, and Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores.

Jennifer A. González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture, is affiliated with the History of Consciousness, Latin American/Latinx Studies, and Feminist Studies. She also teaches annual seminars at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published widely in journals such as Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs, most recently in Diego Riveras America, SFMOMA (2022) and Amalia Mesa Bains, Archeology of Memory (2023). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019) which was named one of the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.

Summer L. Hamilton is an independent researcher who works full-time in digital education in the GLAM field. Her research recovers literary interventions into a harmful discourse surrounding Black housing options during the Jim Crow era. Her work has been published most recently in WSQ. She is co-chair of the American Studies Association Minority Scholars’ Committee. Previously, she was an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship at The Pennsylvania State University. In her position, she co-led digital projects emerging from Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Black Digital Research. Prior to PSU, Hamilton amassed a decade of technical experience working as both a systems and network analyst. She also spent five years as an Upper School English teacher at The Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas.

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man was published in 2015 by Routledge. Neal is co-editor of That's the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Additionally Neal hosts the video webcast Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke.