Flipping Mentoring: Feminist Materialist Praxis as Quiet Activism

This chapter takes up a feminist materialist theoretical approach to consider how mentoring can come to matter differently. It deploys the philosophical concept of ‘relational flips’ (Massumi, 2015) to illuminate how ethico-onto-epistemological response-ability might materialise in and as feminist praxis. It argues that ‘flipping mentoring’ offers a generative and more generous space through which feminist work as quiet activism can be done and have effect in the neoliberal academy. It shows how such work possesses the potential to undo neoliberal modes of mentoring which privilege skills, outputs and outcomes and, instead, urges attention to the material, affective, sensory and bodied aspects of mentoring. The chapter re-turns to empirical materials produced during an institutional mentoring project to illuminate the different differences that flipping mentoring makes possible. Composed as a series of relational flips, the chapter indicates that a reconceptualisation of mentoring as a feminist praxis of quiet activism opens an analytical space for rethinking leadership, care, risk, muddle, time and presence, and brings to the fore affective resonation and response-ability in mentoring practices.