Call for Applications - Convivencia: A Symposium on Mentoring
The Faculty of Color Working Group (FOCWG) invites applications for participation in "Convivencia: A Symposium on Mentoring," to take place March 14-15, 2025 at Wellesley College. The gathering will bring together a small group of faculty of color, at all ranks, who are invested in learning about mentoring as a supportive practice and competency of leadership excellence.
The convivencia, a bringing together of relations, will engage all participants in an exploration of how self, community, and future can be envisioned in collaboration. The work of the convivencia will feature workshops by scholar-leaders with unique perspectives on shaping the support environment for BIPOC faculty. The convivencia will rely on the strength and expertise of all attendees and feature four scholar-leaders: Dr. Lorgia Garcia Peña, author of Community as Rebellion; Dr. Beronda Montgomery, author of Lessons from Plants; Dr. Menah Pratt, author of Blackwildgirl; and Dr. Nelia Viveiros, editor of Incivility and Higher Education: The Costs of Bad Behaviour. These scholar-leaders will enter into conversation with the attending network of mentors and mentees.
We invite interested faculty to apply for participation in the gathering. The FOCWG is committed to ensuring that a strong commitment to developing mentoring and leadership skills is a common goal for all in attendance. Accepted participants will be awarded an honorarium of $450 to help defray travel costs. Participants must commit to engaged attendance on both days of the convivencia.
The goal of the convivencia is to reinvigorate the network, bring new leading voices into conversation, and workshop the mechanisms for network growth and development. As the work of the FOCWG evolves beyond its original Mellon Foundation grant, the convivencia will help seed the foundation for future growth at its next institutional home.
The original FOCWG Mellon Mentors Program–which operated from 2020-2023–worked to partner early-career BIPOC faculty with trained senior mentors to create enduring professional relationships that would provide guidance, resources, and support to early career scholars as they cement their foothold in academia. The FOCWG Mellon Mentors Program created mentoring cohorts that offered multiple models of mentoring and expanded the network of support for program participants. Program participants worked with FOCWG Mellon Mentors—successful faculty committed to the support and advancement of BIPOC colleagues and who participated in the FOCWG Mentor Training Program.
The application deadline has been extended to October 15, 2024.
To apply, click here.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation and in collaboration with New England Humanities Consortium (NEHC) and University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI), the Faculty of Color Working Group (FOCWG) was created to provide extra-institutional space for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty to navigate the particular challenges that they face in their academic positions.
The FOCWG Mentoring Sub-Committee is comprised of the following FOCWG executive board members:
Irene Mata, Associate Professor, Director of the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College
M. Gabriela Torres, Vice Provost and Professor, Rhode Island College
Melva Treviño, Assistant Professor, University of Rhode Island
Background
The FOCWG Mentoring Sub-Committee was tasked with the creation and implementation of a mentoring program to support early- and mid-career BIPOC scholars working in predominantly white institutions, with a particular focus in New England. The overarching goal of this program: to train and implement a diverse (in terms of identity, fields, administrative/faculty experience) regional mentor network that could be institutionally independent, but regionally connected, to help diversify the professoriate at all levels. To accomplish this goal, the FOCWG Mentoring Sub-Committee created the FOCWG Mellon Mentors program – a supportive community and network of scholars that collectively work to alleviate the unequal advancement of BIPOC through the ranks of academia.
The Mentoring Sub-Committee aimed to design a program that could foster enduring professional relationships where senior BIPOC scholars could mentor and provide guidance, resources, and support to early-career BIPOC scholars as they cement their foothold in academia and advance through various academic stages. To do this, we sought out to identify broad areas of mentoring needs among BIPOC at predominantly white institutions. To ensure these mentoring needs were truly representative of the needs of BIPOC faculty (and not only defined by the Mentoring Sub-Committee), we developed a needs assessment survey. The aims of the survey were two-fold. First, to increase our understanding of the experiences and realities of BIPOC faculty through the collection of qualitative data. Second, to incorporate this information in the development of a mentoring program that meets the needs of BIPOC across the institutions represented in the FOCWG consortium. Over 180 participants from across the U.S. participated in this project.
Program Implementation
The FOCWG Mentoring Sub-Committee successfully established and executed a mentoring program designed to foster and support the creation of mentorship relationships that could benefit individual mentors and mentees while encouraging change at the institutional level.
Early-career BIPOC faculty were paired with trained senior mentors. Mentors had one-on-one monthly meetings with their mentees throughout the academic year. In these meetings, mentors provided mentees with active guidance and strategies to help them navigate obstacles, bridge institutional lacunae, and address their specific needs. Departing from more traditional mentoring models designed to develop top-down, hierarchical mentor-mentee relationships, the program prioritized the creation of mentoring cohorts. We intentionally built opportunities into the programming to allow for lateral and peer mentoring to flourish. This cohort-based mentoring model expanded the regional network of support of all participants in the program – both the mentors and mentees.
This project had a three-year timeline (2020-2023). In Year 1 (AY 2020-2021), the Mentoring Sub-Committed designed the FOCWG Mellon Mentors program and identified mentor trainers and mentors. The mentoring program ran in full capacity in Years 2 (AY 2021-2022) and 3 (AY 2022-2023).
The Mentor Trainers
Three vetted and intentionally selected senior scholars were invited to act as Mentor Trainers. These trainers aided in creating a training curriculum and each of them facilitated a workshop for the mentors. As part of this component of the mentoring program, the Mentoring Sub-Committee co-organized and coordinated the following workshops:
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Audrey J. Murrell, University of Pittsburgh
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Jacqueline Mattis, Rutgers University
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Sandy Grande, University of Connecticut
The Mentors
● Pawan Dhingra (Amherst College)
● Soo Hong (Wellesley College)
● Hilda Lloréns (University of Rhode Island)
● Noe Montez (Emory University)
● Kendall Moore (University of Rhode Island)
● Faith Smith (Brandeis University)
● M. Gabriela Torres (Rhode Island College)
● Javier Treviño (Wheaton College)
● Kiara Vigil (Amherst College)
● Renée White (The New School)
● Adriana Zavala (Tufts University)
The Mentees
The 2021-2022 FOCWG Mellon Mentees
● Alvita Akiboh (Yale University)
● Ana Almeyda-Cohen (Colby College)
● Jorge E. Cuéllar (Dartmouth College)
● María J. Durán (Brandeis University)
● Tamanika Ferguson (Allegheny College)
● Patricia Lopez (University of Washington)
● Najwa Mayer (Boston University)
● Anita J. Mixon (Wayne State University)
● Watufani M. Poe (Tulane University)
● Nicolás Ramos Flores (Colby College)
● Srijana Shrestha (Wheaton College)
The 2022-2023 FOCWG Mellon Mentees
● Madhavi Devasher (University of New Hampshire)
● Hardeep Dhillon (University of Pennsylvania)
● Kaisha Esty (Wesleyan University)
● Cristina Faiver-Serna (University of New Hampshire)
● Inaash Islam (College of the Holy Cross)
● Raquel Madrigal (Vassar College)
● Asif Majid (University of Connecticut)
● Ada McKenzie Thomas (Wheaton College)
● Sahar D. Sattarzadeh (University of Texas at Arlington)
● Ximena Sevilla (University of Rhode Island)
Irene Mata is currently the Director of the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, an Associate Professor of American Studies, and the Faculty Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Wellesley College. She was born and raised in an immigrant family in the El Paso/Juárez border area and earned my BA and MA in English and Women’s Studies from New Mexico State University and my PhD in Literature from the University of California at San Diego. Her research blends my love of literature, performance, and cultural studies and focuses on interrogating the representation of communities of color in contemporary creative works. Her first book, Domestic Disturbances: Re-Imagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration, examines the stories created by Chicana/Latina writers through a new immigrant narrative paradigm. Her second manuscript, Beyond the Moment: The Art of Resistance in Latinx Performance, engages with Latinx performance texts that rely on previous moments of resistance to imagine new—and future—visions of social change. At the root of all of her work is a deep love for community and an abiding commitment to social justice.
M. Gabriela Torres is Vice Provost at Rhode Island College. She is a transformative leader committed to fostering a more diverse and socially just academy. Her work has specialized on the development of strategic program initiatives, global, arts, and science academic center operations, accreditation, research compliance, and DEIB strategic planning and implementation processes in faculty hiring, recruitment, and retention. Dr. Torres’ dedication to innovation in transforming access to learning in higher education grew directly from her award-winning teaching and educational development background. In recognition of her leadership, Dr. Torres was named an American Council on Education Fellow in 2023. As a scholar, she has published over 30 peer–reviewed articles, research reports, and book chapters, in addition to volumes on Marital Rape and Sexual Violence in Intimacy. Most recently, Dr. Torres has published regularly on anti-racist and intercultural teaching and learning, BIPOC mentoring in higher education, and on equity policies. In addition, Dr. Torres has been sought as an expert witness since 2011 in US and Canadian courts where she has provided country conditions expertise on gender-based, gang, and anti-indigenous violence in Guatemala. Her expert testimony has been used in asylum courts, US District Court, Canadian Federal Court, and NY Criminal Court and Criminal and Juvenile courts in NY and MA.
Melva Treviño is an assistant professor in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems program at the University of Rhode Island. She is a human geographer and an ethnographer. Her broad research interests concern studying how intersecting identities (e.g., gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, education level, etc.) inform people’s perceptions of the environment and their responses to environmental change. Through a wide range of projects, she investigates how power asymmetries – specifically unequal access to resources – are produced in natural spaces, their implications on the physical and discursive (re)constructions of nature, and on the groups who have strong attachments to these spaces. Her current research in Rhode Island examines how and why members from marginalized ethnic and racialized communities, especially shore fishers, seek access to marine resources to improve their food security and overall well-being. With this research, she aims to identify new and more equitable policy opportunities that strategically reduce barriers to coastal access for marginalized groups and recognize the contributions of self-provisioned fisheries to local & regional food security. She also has experience working with coastal communities facing diverse marine fisheries issues abroad, specifically, Ecuador, and more recently Micronesia.