After a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, the CSAA Mentoring Scheme is back in action for 2021.
The Mentoring Scheme is designed to provide professional guidance and support to CSAA members who are early career academics, independent scholars and in non-continuing positions or regional locations. Applicants should already have their PhD, although if you have submitted and are awaiting results, you may also apply.
At this stage, we are asking for established scholars to volunteer as mentors. It would be great to see mid-career scholars sign up, as well as more senior members. As anyone who has mentored or been mentored will know, it can be a very rewarding experience that can lead to enduring friendships. It does involve a time commitment, however, which would typically be 4-6 online meetings over the remainder of 2021.This year, we will be supplementing one-on-one meetings between mentors and mentees with some group sessions for the mentees to share experiences, ask questions and get to know one another. Those will be entirely optional for mentors.
To apply, send an email to Michael Richardson via michael.richardson@unsw.edu.au with a couple of words about the kind of mentoring you’d feel best equipped to do (publishing, grants, teaching, job applications, etc). Please note, if you volunteered to mentor in 2019, Michael will be in touch directly to see if you still want to stay on the roster.
At our last call for mentors in 2019, the vast majority of initial volunteers were women. And, as many members would know intimately, women often take up the bulk of mentoring responsibilities in their work contexts too. So in making this call, I would like to emphasise two things:First, it would be excellent to see more men put their hands up to mentor. Second, if you know that you already do a lot of this work, please don’t feel obliged to put yourself forward now.
With many talented and thoughtful scholars in our midst, I’ve no doubt that we can put together a terrific group of mentors that captures the richness and breadth of cultural studies and cognate scholarship in Australasia that is also more equitable in its distribution of labour.
Stay tuned for another call for mentees in the next couple of weeks.
