18: Mentorship Beyond Borders: Cultivating (Counter)Spaces of Wholeness for Faculty, Students, and Professionals From International Backgrounds

In this chapter, we choose to center our international backgrounds because of our transition, unlike those of our US.-based peers, are not only shaped by career progression but also by immigration policies, cultural adaptation, and systemic exclusions that render us perpetually in‑between—between countries, legal statuses, and professional identities. By focusing on our experiences as graduate students, professionals, and early‑career faculty from international backgrounds, we highlight the ways our liminal positionality gives us an opportunity to think about what mentorship means and can look like for those wanting to deconstruct current systems and humanize higher education.

There is not a single narrative for mentorship as role expectations, support structures, and transition pathways are diverse given the different types of roles (e.g., lecturer, faculty of practice, tenure track, professional and administrative, or research and policy, MA or PhD students) and institutional types (e.g., research intensive institutions, regional comprehensive teaching-focused institutions, and community colleges). As such, mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral scholars for preparing and transitioning into roles is important to their success in career planning, obtaining jobs, and succeeding in them (Butz et al., 2019; Gibbs et al., 2015; Subramanian et al., 2022). While the pathways to career are complex, previous research has shown that structural barriers systematically make it more difficult for graduate students with marginalized identities to navigate complexities of the academia, job market, as well as in their new work environments as faculty or professionals once they secured a position (Griffin et al., 2022; McCormick & Willcox, 2019). Mentoring then plays a crucial role for faculty with marginalized identities to navigate the interplay of structural systems like racism, heteropatriarchy, cisgenderism, ableism, etc. within institutional contexts (Butz et al., 2019; Jain & Solórzano, 2015).