Communal Conversations: Black Women World-Making Through Mentorship

Abstract

This article focuses on the mentoring relationships Black women create and develop. The authors highlight how mentoring is communal and the ways these relationships serve to connect communities of Black women as resources of support. The article illuminates the generative power of Black women’s mentoring relationships to create alternate realities that make the academy more accessible, supportive, and beneficial for Black women. Black women engage in these mentoring relationships as acts of resistance by fighting to make space for their voices to be heard. As members of marginalized communities and outsiders within the academy, the article utilizes conversation as a method of inquiry, to share a curated exchange between the co-authors, Nicole M. Brown and Ruby Mendenhall, discussing the evolution of their decade’s long mentoring relationship.