Mentorship can bolster academic success, work-life balance, and feelings of belonging. Yet finding mentors is often challenging, and mentoring experiences vary widely. Mentoring programs are typically addressed to graduate students and early-career faculty, leaving mid-career faculty with few sources of formal mentorship. Mentoring relationships can be complicated by incompatible expectations. As recent scholarship on mentoring has shown, mentoring can replicate as well as challenge dominant institutional power structures.

This roundtable invites reflections on ways to enact mentoring as an intersectional feminist practice, one that works toward equity and inclusivity with sensitivity to intersecting identities and forms of oppression. We particularly welcome discussions of creative and non-traditional approaches to mentoring, including co-mentoring, lateral mentoring, multi-directional mentoring, and mentoring across disciplines and fields.

Submissions may address the following questions, among others:

- How can mentoring challenge exclusionary institutional structures, policies, and procedures?

- How can mentoring address the varied dimensions of the lives of mentees and mentors?

- What enables mentoring to take shape as a collaborative relationship that provides mutual care and support?

- How best to mentor the mentors – in terms of both caring for mentors and helping them recognize their own blindspots in addressing the needs of mentees?

This NeMLA 2022 roundtable aims to bring together participants from varied stages of their careers and include perspectives from mentors as well as mentees. Participants will give short informal talks followed by substantial time for Q&A. Please submit 200-300 word abstract and bio to Lisa Propst and Maria Rovito through the NeMLA website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla