Mentors and sponsors: Making a difference for racially and culturally minoritised academics in Australian universities

Abstract

Mentorship and sponsorships play a significant role in faculty experiences, career trajectories, well-being and academic success in higher education. In this study, 23 racially and culturally minoritised (RACM) academics were interviewed about their experiences working in Australian universities, and all spoke about the key importance of their mentoring experiences. Mentorship was understood as both enabling and constricting, with unspoken rules of conduct and an embedded hierarchical relationship that could perpetuate the exclusion of both marginalised scholars and scholarship. In this paper, the theory of practice architectures, part of a wider ‘practice turn’ within education and the social sciences, was used to conceptualise the qualitative analysis of how mentoring arrangements are experienced by RACM academics in Australian universities. Here, we view academic mentoring as a social architectural practice whose power is articulated in discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements and enacted through language (sayings), actions (doings) and relationships (relatings). This study offers insight not only into the structural and experiential landscape of mentoring for RACM academics but also provides an opportunity to envision pathways for its transformation.