Building Mentorship Networks to Support Black Women

This new book in the Diverse Faculty in the Academy series pulls back the curtain on what Black women have done to mentor each other in higher education, provides advice for navigating unwelcoming campus environments, and explores avenues for institutions to support and foster minoritized women's success in the academy.
Chapter authors present critical approaches to advance equity and to achieve trust and transparency in the academy. Drawing on examples of mentoring between Black women students, faculty, and administrators in and outside of the academy from diverse institutional contexts, exploring the use of digital technologies, and framed by theoretical concepts from a range of disciplines, this important volume provides insights on mentoring that can be employed across all of higher education to support the success of Black women faculty.
Full of actionable steps that institutional leaders can take to support the network of mentors it takes to be successful in the academy, this book is a must read for department and university leaders, faculty, and graduate students in Higher Education interested in supporting and fostering mentoring for those most vulnerable in the academic pathway for success.

Bridget Turner Kelly is Associate Professor of Student Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Sharon Fries-Britt is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Dr. Fries-Britt was the recipient of AERA's 2021 Social Justice in Education Award.

SECTION I. Mentoring across Rank: Possibility Model Network 1. Still Retaining Each Other: Sustained Mentoring 2. A Critical Duoethnographic Account of Two Black Women Faculty Using Co-mentoring to Traverse Academic Life 3. Engaging in (De)liberate Dialogue: An Endarkened Feminist Trio-ethnography among Black Teacher Educators 4. On Seeing Academics Who Are Black and Women: Understanding the Ontological We SECTION II. Peer Mentoring Network: Standing in the Gap 5. Solidifying our 'Scholarhood': Growing (up) Together as Black Women in the Academy 6. Contemporary Digital Mentoring Relationships and Community Building among Black Women Academics: "We All We Got" 7. How #CiteASista Leveraged Online Platforms to Center Black Womxn SECTION III. Mentoring for Radical Self Care: Centering Self in the Network 8. For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Tenure Track Got Too Rough 9. Retained by the Grace of Sisterhood: The Making of an African Woman Academic in US Academia SECTION IV. Power of Community Mentoring: Expanded Sister Circle Network 10. #BlackWomxnHealing: An Intergenerational Space of Creative Communal Care for Round the Way Blackgirls in Academia 11. A Black Professor's Resistance and Renewal: Journey Reflections with Letters to my Daughter and Educators Who Labor for Freedom and Liberation 12. Black Women Faculty-Doctoral Student Mentoring Relationships: SistUH Scholars 13. Pathways to Success for Black Women by Black Women