Reimagining Mentoring in Social Work Doctoral Programs: a Critical Duoethnographic Narrative of Counterspaces

Mentoring plays an essential role in cultivating current and prospective social work scholars, educators, and practitioners by fostering supportive relationships that promote skill development, degree completion, and career advancement. However, mentoring relationships in social work doctoral programs are subject to interlocking systems of power and oppression reproduced in the academy including settler colonialism, white supremacy, and neoliberalism. As a result, faculty and doctoral students are forced to negotiate dominant power structures and discourses of mentoring that privilege individualism and extraction, which contradict the profession's commitment to advancing social justice. This article uses duoethnography to explore the discourses and narratives of mentoring through a critical lens and analysis of power between a doctoral faculty mentor and doctoral student advisee. Both individuals currently serve as faculty in academic institutions and explore the inquiry of the study reflecting on their prior and current formal and informal mentoring experiences and relationships with one another. Exploration of alternative and holistic forms of mentoring that integrate embodiment, ethical relationality, and critical feminist approaches are discussed. Mentoring in social work doctoral programs remains a site of ongoing struggle. Implications for social work doctoral programs are explored.