Women Faculty of Colour, Critical Mentoring and Feminist Leadership in the Academy

Constituting only 2% of the professoriate, women faculty of colour are under-represented and under-supported in UK Universities (Bhopal 2020). The barriers to their career advancement are well-documented as is the importance of access to mentoring to their ‘success’ in the academy (Lloyd-Jones and Jean-Marie 2020). Climbing up the leadership echelons is a conventional marker of ‘success’. However, the mentorship and leadership experiences of women faculty of colour are rarely known or examined past feminist leadership cyphers and personal support networks (Lewis and Miller 2018). This paper is an attempt at ‘naming’ my own mentorship and leadership experiences as a cis-gendered woman faculty of colour, as an Asian Indian immigrant, working primarily in the area of gender and sexualities studies in predominantly white spaces of British higher education for over a decade. Mobilising and interweaving perspectives from postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theories with autoethnographic narratives and self-reflexive analyses, this paper is also an invitation to rethink mentoring practices and relatedly, the notions of leadership and ‘success’ within the higher education sector in ways that can contribute to decolonising the academy (Asher 2010). I begin by examining what forms of mentorship (mentors as nightlights/allies/co-travellers) and leadership activities (in teaching, research and administration) I have encountered and engaged in during my career. I then reflect on how I have navigated, in the process, complex and contradictory issues and feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility, complicity, ambivalence and strategic compromise, isolation, loss and exhaustion as well as agency, empowerment and allyship, and personal and collective joy and transformation. I conclude with some unresolved dilemmas and insights I have gleaned from my experiences, which I hope will generate meaningful dialogue and self-reflection between and among mentors, women faculty of colour and all those committed to transforming the academy into a more equitable and inclusive space.