Women of Color Navigating Mentoring Relationships: Critical Examinations

Women of Color Navigating Mentoring Relationships explores and critically examines the opportunities and challenges presented in mentoring relationships involving women of color. While all mentoring relationships are unique to the individuals involved in them, this book highlights the roles of race, class, and gender-oriented constructions in the establishment, maintenance, and dissolution of specific mentoring relationships in which women of color are engaged. This edited collection argues that traditional notions of mentoring fail to account for intersectionality and power dynamics that can have profound effects on mentoring practices, and that institutional “best practices” for mentoring do little to address the impact of constructions of “otherness” on the success (or failure) of mentoring relationships involving women of color.. Recommended for scholars of communication studies, gender studies, race studies, and for scholars pursuing a career in academia.

Table of Contents:
Preface Keisha Edwards Tassie Chapter 1: Relationships as Sites for Advancement: How African American Female Leaders Successfully Navigate Mentoring in the Workplace Creshema R. Murray Chapter 2: Co-Creating Professional Development Opportunities for Moving from “Pet” to Peer: Examining Mentoring Experiences of African American Female Graduate Students Aspiring to Become Tenure-Track Professors Cerise L. Glenn Chapter 3: “It Takes a Village to Raise a Professor”: Being Mentored and Mentoring from a Marginalized Space Tina M. Harris Chapter 4: A Story of Mentoring: From Praxis to Theory Fatima Chrifi Alaoui & Bernadette M. Calafell Chapter 5: Women of Color and Mentoring: Fictional Case Portraits of a Failed Mentoring Framework Tiffany A. Flowers Chapter 6: Mentoring Our Own: African American Women in Engineering Virginia Cook Tickles & Ezella McPherson Chapter 7: Beyond Student and Teacher: Recollections and Reflections on, and Critique of, Cross Cultural Mentoring Rehana Seepersad, Chaundra L. Whitehead, Keisha Hill-Grey, & Tonette S. Rocco Chapter 8: Disregarding Negative Statements about the Failures of Race-Gender Mentoring Pairings: How a White Man Can Mentor a Young, Black Woman from a Bachelor’s Degree to a PhD Tia C. M. Tyree Chapter 9: Mentors and Sister-Friends: The Intersection of Race, Multiplicity, and Holism with Online Social Media Catherine Knight Steele and Jenny Ungbha Korn Conclusion Sonja M. Brown Givens

About the Author :
Keisha Edwards Tassie is associate professor of communication at Morehouse College. Sonja M. Brown Givens is associate vice president for academic affairs at Medaille College.

Review :
Women of Color Navigating Mentoring Relationships is a stellar addition to the field of mentoring research. As a mentor program director, this collection provides a progressive framework for intercultural dynamics, which I intend to use for program change. I have looked a long time for a comprehensive book that digs more critically into issues of race, class, and identity in mentoring. This is a fantastic collection! The personal voices in this book offered insights that no other form of academic discourse could offer. My thanks to the writers for their vulnerability and teachings in these pages. The stories, strategies, and advice in Women of Color Navigating Mentoring Relationships: Critical Examinations provides critical and powerful insights into what it is like to be a woman of color in higher education. This text challenges us to rethink our own realities and consider how we will collaborate to create opportunities for women of color who are navigating their academic journey. I was drawn in by this collection’s elaborations on co-mentorship, as well as both the protégé and mentor perspectives. Using many personal stories, Tassie and Brown Givens have well illustrated their philosophy of mentoring and mentoring strategies that are consistent with much of the past empirical research on mentoring. This is a worthwhile book to read!