After 35 years of teaching, research-action and feminism, I still find the mentoring of women, in hetero-sexist, classist and colonial academic institutions, as a challenging mission (Corradi, Routledge, 2018) Strategies that proved to be effective relate to making the mentorship a
collective effort, in a non-hierarchical and circular model, where peers’ support becomes as important as the advisors’. Will report the ongoing experience of the
Decolonial Feminist Queer Lab in my university, an intersectional experience started in year 2003. Besides difficulties due to lack of fundings, bureaucracy, and authoritarianism, a positive evaluation is made. Being considered as one of the ‘mothers of intersectionality’ in my country (https://www.inchiestaonline.it/donne-lavoro-femminismi/praticare-lintersezionalita-un-metodo-per-la-ricerca-e-per-la-trasformazione-sociale-intervista-a-laura-corradi/), I can testify the difficulties of making teaching and research really intersectional; the lack of feminist sociological schools and recognized genealogies makes possible the appropriation and subsumption of feminists’ ideas for non-feminist purposes, in an Academia, where the teaching of social sciences is still, by and large, focusing on the ‘Fathers of Sociology: an enduring ‘original sin’.
Yet, the presence of women sociologists in this world has been significant since the 1930’ (Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge, McGraw-Hill, 1998). A politics of erasure has been working relentlessly. I believe the valorization of works by feminist sociologists is an urgent step to be taken by ISA: making pressure on national organizations who are quite silent on the topic; giving space and attention to feminist sociological and intersectional contributions in the past and present time; promoting visibility and understanding. The epistemic proposal of Jineology as a ‘Science of Women’ (Meral Duzgun, JMEWS, 2016; Piccardi, Barca, Springer-Nature 2022; Al-Ali, Käser, Cambridge, 2020) urges to rescue her/story and women’s knowledges in all fields, to build a ‘sociology of freedom’, transforming and democratizing the academic context; ensuring a successful mentorship to subjects willing to become feminist scholars/activists.
