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Scott Black: How can we best support and mentor our colleagues? What are the best practices and strategies coming out of feminist pedagogies? How can we bring the critical insights of scholars to our own work in our scholarly communities?

Welcome to The Virtual Jewel Box podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I'm Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am delighted to welcome Dr. Leandra Hernández and Dr. Omi Salas-SantaCruz, who will be talking about Dr. Hernández’s new book, Queer, Women of Color, and Critical Approaches to Feminist Mentorship and Pedagogy, which Dr. Hernández co-edited with Stevie M. Munz and Jessica Pauly.

Dr. Hernández is associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, who works on queer, critical, and Chicana feminist health and media studies. Dr. Salas-SantaCruz is assistant professor in the Department of Education, Culture & Society at the University of Utah, who works on decolonial theory, transgender studies, borderlands theory, and critical race studies.

Welcome, Leandra.

Leandra Hernández: Thank you so much for having us.

Scott Black: Welcome, Omi.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Thank you. Let me start by saying this book grabbed me right away. Mentorship has been complicated in my own life. I had some really bad mentors.

Leandra Hernández: Oh no.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah, unfortunately, mentors who were more about gatekeeping than about care. And because of that, I try to do the opposite. But doing the opposite, to be honest, is not quite easy.

I needed a practical guide, and in many ways this book was that guide for me. So I appreciate the intervention of—

Leandra Hernández: Of course. And thank you for being here with me today for the conversation. I'm just so excited to talk about all of these things with you.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah. So one of the first things in the book is that it talks about expectations and desires.

The chapter on testimonio, for example. The idea that we can name what we want from and with each other. It’s so simple, yet it's quite radical and necessary when we're talking about mentorship. I was really moved by how the collection of chapters is grounded in both Black feminist and Chicana/Latina feminist traditions specifically, because it reminded me of the kinds of mentorship that I grew up with, especially the mentorship of my grandmother, for example.

Not so much about intellectual growth, but nurturing and care. Yes. So for me, in this book, even though I'm a professor of philosophy and theory, it's pretty much a lived practice. And in many ways, the words that I use to describe this are sanctuary and, in your own words, ecological webs.

For me, these things show us that mentorship is this radical feminist, community-rooted practice that we kind of know something about but don't quite yet know how to practice.

Leandra Hernández: Absolutely. Yeah. You nailed it.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: This is why I'm really excited to be invited into this conversation.

So I want to start there. What inspired you and your co-editors to make mentorship the center of this book?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah, that's such a great question, because even your point earlier about naming what we need and then making it happen and going after it—that is actually quite literally what happened with this book.

This book is connected to an earlier co-edited book that Stevie and Jessica and I published in 2023 called Feminist Mentoring in Academia. The book stems from a complaint, building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of complaint as feminist pedagogy, and it was also our own collective approach to institute, or at least try to enact, some sort of institutional change.

At a previous institution where we were all connected, we found out about this moment, this instance, this complaint, this grievance. In trying to figure out how to navigate that institutionally, we inevitably ended up forging radical feminist friendships—networks of mentorship and solidarity.

We leaned on our own external mentors, not just in academia but in other spaces as well, to help us navigate the process. And we learned so much about what it means to mentor and be mentored, what it means to be connected by trust and to be vulnerable. And we also learned about the power of collective organizing as a long-term strategy.

And I really mean long term. I think oftentimes when we need to enact some sort of change, we feel like it has to happen immediately. This process—at a micro level of navigating the issues, but also at a macro level of publishing the book—took years. And in many ways, this is still an ongoing process.

So for all of our colleagues out there who are feeling some of these struggles and woes, I remind you, as I remind myself every day: change takes time. It's the little micro-level daily practices that help us get there. And along the way, we learned a lot about the woes and the struggles and some of the failures of mentorship too.

So really, the book is rooted in that. And I always joke with our graduate students that I'm a kitchen-sink scholar. When I was in graduate school, I remember telling my committee chair, “I want to do intersectionality and reproductive justice and health comm and media studies,” and he's like, “Leah, honey, that's the kitchen sink. I need you to focus on one plate or one utensil.”

I didn't have the words back then to articulate it, but I do now. Something that I always tell folks is that many of us don't live single-issue lives. Therefore we can't really just use a single-issue theory or method to think about the world or our burning questions.

The reason I mention that here is to go back to your question about what inspired the book. Most of my work recently has been focusing on pedagogy and mentorship, and perhaps less so on some of my other traditional research. I kept being haunted by these questions of what it means to actually be an academic or to do academia. What does it mean to focus on relationality and care and support and surviving and thriving, as opposed to maybe the more traditional approaches that have encouraged us to just focus on our research and get it done and get tenure?

As I was getting closer to getting my portfolio ready for tenure, I kept saying, “These questions are haunting me. I have to engage them.” So that's why a lot of the work has been in this mentorship and pedagogy vein, and also advocating for more space for that in our research and in our tenure policies and so on, so that we don't have to feel like we can only focus on research in one way.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah, absolutely. And I hear you in the sense of the long-term process of cultivating mentorship. That brings me to your chapter on comadrisma.

For the listeners, this is a word that comes from Latina/Chicana traditions of comradery, and it speaks of long-term cultivating friendships, relationships, intimacy, accountability, and cultural grounding.

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. Right.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: So it's more of a reciprocal relationship than the top-down understanding of guidance and mentorship that we see in academia.

You describe comadrisma as trust, vulnerability, and care. For me, it gives me language to do something around naming that feeling that needs to be present in mentorship relationships. It's like, “Oh, I'm cultivating this relationship around or with the comadre.” So in many senses, I have a comadre relationship myself. And that's a relationship that I built not just in community, but around certain expectations of care and trust.

So I wanted to ask you: can you share a little bit about what you mean with comadrisma as mentorship or a model of mentorship, and what experiences or traditions led you to use this framework specifically?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with thinking about how we came to it and the experiences or traditions before I hop to the definition.

This concept has really grown in collaboration with my best friend, my sister-scholar, Dr. Sarah De Los Santos Upton at the University of Texas at El Paso. I love telling this story. It's so funny because it's so out of the ordinary, but it also highlights how wonderful serendipity can be sometimes.

Sarah and I are both Chicana feminist borderlands scholars, but we weren't really connected in a lot of the same conference networks or spaces the way other folks might have been. We were actually at a separate conference in our field, OSCLG, or Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender. I think this was in 2013. She came up to me after my panel and said, “I really like your hair.” And I said, “Oh my goodness, I love your hair,” because we have similar hair, just different curl patterns.

We became good friends and best friends and collaborators and then quite literally sisters afterwards. So much of our shared work together has focused on—first, our scholarship started by talking about feminist theory and gender violence at the U.S.–Mexico border. But then, when we realized that we needed to take a moment and shift from focusing so much on violence and focus more on joy, this is when we started to think about other scholarship we could work on, like comadrisma.

In some of our earlier work, we've explored comadrisma as a concept and praxis, which is really rooted, like you noted, in our own experiences of Latina and Chicana feminist praxis. It stems from our collaborative research and our friendship, namely with Sarah as a mother and me as a child-free individual, and us trying to make sense of our own experiences in higher education related to how to balance and manage being a parent on the tenure clock, and how child-free individuals can show up for parents or those with other family formations.

In conference spaces, we think about how we can trade off on authorship on publications, or bring in more folks to the collaborative so we can publish more, publish more meaningfully, alternate author roles. If Sarah says, “Oh my goodness, my child is sick, I can't meet this deadline,” I can say, “I can step in for you. We'll still get it done.”

A fun fact: Sarah has three children, all three of whom were born after each one of our books was published, and I mean within like one week. So we always joke that Sarah and I birthed a book and then she birthed a human, and we birthed a co-edited book and then she birthed a human. Her children were with us every step of the way.

Thinking about comadrisma really helps us think about how Spanish-to-English and vice versa translations don't always capture the essence of the word. When we thought about comadre, which literally translates to “co-mother,” that's when we were thinking about how this could be utilized as a lens or a theoretical framework for how we practice mentorship with each other.

It's also rooted in our own lived experiences as Mexican American women born and raised in Texas, and really seeing our abuelas’ relationships with their best friends—our mothers’ godmothers, right? And then our madrinas, our godmothers, who were best friends with our mothers. So it's also this very real witnessing of the power of friendship and solidarity in the notion that it takes a village to raise a child.

It takes a village to raise an academic. It takes a village for us to get tenure. Those were all of the same ideas that we had there.

So it really is rooted in collective care, support, and solidarity that seeks to push back against academic norms that devalue care work and love and support. In our very first chapter that we wrote about, where we were laying out the groundwork for this, we included a picture of us at a conference where Sarah had her daughter Isabel sitting on the conference table with us while we were presenting, and then we would just trade off. One of us could be talking, one of us could be engaging, one of us could be feeding Isabel or changing her diaper or whatever the case may be.

That's just one example of how we think about mentorship in our lived experience, but really to think about how comadrisma can offer a space for healing, or to honor our vivencias in ways that academia typically has excluded or, even worse, dehumanized.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: I love that. As I'm hearing you speak, I actually have a comadrisma relationship with Dr. Claudia Garcia-Louis at UT San Antonio, Texas.

She invited me to a writing retreat at her home with other colleagues. I think there were power outages and glitches in the airport, and I was the only one that made it. So her kids were at home. Her child just wanted to play and swim, and I was seeing how she needed to do a lot of work and just focus on her writing. So I said, “You know what? I got this.”

I jumped in the pool and I was that babysitter for the week. And you know what? That actually enabled me to write some more when I got back, even though I did not spend my time writing. I was there co-parenting for that week and seeing how she needed that kind of support for the writing.

To me, I'm hearing you talk and now I have language—that we're doing this co-mentorship as co-mothering, and it is just very powerful to hear you say the different practices that can come up.

I think this leads me to my next question: if a university embraced this notion of comadrisma, what might look different in the culture or in the policies, or in the way we engage with students and other faculty?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah, absolutely. I love that so much. The chapter in the book that we talk about focuses on comadrisma as a writing mentorship strategy, and this is one chapter or one iteration of the larger framework that we're swimming in and making sense of.

That chapter was really rooted in some of our own machista, patriarchal experiences in the academy, with reviews where men would have certain comments—and we knew they were men because they would tell us that they were men—and they would have certain comments about the language we were using or the arguments we were making. There were also other disproportionate levels of labor at conference service spaces and things of that nature.

The chapter in the book specifically offers five contours in relation to that context, but I have more thoughts too. The framework is essentially trying to challenge essentialism in our disciplines and academic spaces, think creatively about how to write intersectionality, and how to empower all members of the research process. So none of this, “We're going to have an RA, you're going to do a lot of the work, but you're not going to get publication.” We're not doing that anymore. Other people shouldn't do it either—but that's another hill for another podcast episode.

The framework is about breaking apart from and resisting gatekeeping processes, altering historical traditions of language dominance, and trying to enact feminist solidarity in confronting and resisting these histories.

Now, I mentioned already that this is just one iteration. But when I think about what that means for us in higher education, I want to continue advocating for educators and collaborators to use ethics of care in their scholarship. So often—and necessarily so—our models and frameworks focus on doing no harm to participants, and I say necessarily so because we always need to be mindful of that. But we don't really talk that much about what it means to do no harm to each other in the writing process, when we're trying to develop relationships with each other, research collaboratives, and so on.

This ethic of care really does inform our entire approach to higher ed: how we mentor each other, how we write with each other, how we navigate the publication process together. In thinking about what this means for organizers or people who are wearing multiple hats, the same ethic of care can be applied there, especially with organizing goals and recognizing that our bodies can only do so much at any given moment, especially now.

So comadrisma’s ethic can help us think about how we can best share the love and the labor to achieve whatever sort of social change we're after. That's one of the questions that continues to lie at the heart of multiple iterations of this framework.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah, absolutely. I'm hearing you talk about the ethic of care and the sharing of labor, and it really makes me think about precarity and the weight of labor, specifically when we think about women of color, queer and trans faculty, who tend to carry that extra weight more than others.

This brings me to talking about precarity. Faculty of color and queer and trans faculty are often expected to mentor far beyond what's fair. Meanwhile, students from marginalized backgrounds are in environments that are not built for them.

I see two chapters speaking a little bit about this: the chapter on “Marginal Bodies” and the chapter by Mick Brewer, “Scattered Bodies Swimming Upstream,” which employs an ecological lens to demonstrate how sexuality as an identity influences mentorship. My question to you is: if you can speak on these two chapters, what do they contribute to your understanding of precarity in mentorship, and if anything, do they complicate or complement comadrisma?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah, I love that so much. One of the things I love is how you're building on the threads in the chapters, which brings me so much joy. I wish I would've had this conversation before I wrote the conclusion. It's okay—we'll edit and update later.

“Marginal Bodies,” by Pat Davis and Brittany Clardy, and Mick’s chapter, “Scattered Bodies Swimming Upstream,” really illustrate how feminist mentorship, solidarity, and praxis can resist precarity, or at least offer a space of love and support and transformation in response to precarious times.

“Marginal Bodies” is a really fascinating chapter with Pat, who is one of our advanced or senior scholars in our field, and Brittany, who started her work with Pat as an undergraduate student. This was not just a little project that they did. Together they created a project, Marginal Bodies, which was a social-justice-grant-funded visual exhibition. They applied for funding, and they rolled out this exhibition together, connecting the history of Black women's voice and representation to contemporary struggles for racial violence and justice in the wake of police brutality.

If you're thinking about how an undergraduate is working on this project, there's so much maturity and wisdom being shared there between Pat and Brittany. Their work really highlights how Black feminist mentorship specifically can inform how we practice care and empathy in precarious times. They've stayed together, working and communicating very closely even after Brittany graduated. It's one model of many that shows how times can feel heavy, as they often do, but these mentorship relationships offer us survival and a space to thrive.

Mick’s chapter is so fascinating too, because his explores the politics of gay men in feminist mentorship. His chapter is really trying to complicate and disentangle what it means to be a gay man in a feminist mentorship relationship and what that means for feminist world-making. World-making is another one of those themes that runs through the book.

His chapter gives us a heuristic that we can use to think about how mentorship couplings come together and how we can navigate identities that some people might not expect to see in that space. Mick asks us to think about absence, isolation, invisibility, and disconnect—feelings that queer folks and feminist folks can feel together—and what it means to engage in coalition building to address precarity.

I really loved his chapter too, because so many of my own mentees and advisees are queer individuals, as I am myself. One of my students whom I love dearly is a gay white man, and he wouldn't mind if I said this because we talk about it all the time. Sometimes he says, “I just want to be mindful that as a gay white man, I am not unloading all of my emotional labor on you all the time.”

I joke with him that I kind of feel like in our mentorship relationship, I'm like a queer tía or a queer auntie. So I tell him, “If you have no one else to tell, you can of course tell me.” But I also think that example raises the important question of boundaries. What do boundaries look like in these mentorship spaces, particularly when we are all collectively trying to resist and live in times of precarity, but also trying to make sure that we ourselves are swimming and not drowning?

So, lots of metaphors there and lots to think about.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah, absolutely. I also think he brings this notion of ecological mentorship, that it's like: think bigger. Think of mentoring as a whole ecosystem. Not everyone can do everything for you.

To me, this is one of my favorite chapters. As a queer person myself, it really spoke directly to me. It reminded me that we don't thrive alone. None of us thrive alone. We grow through multiple relationships, through communities that sustain us, through informal and formal relationships that we make across different aspects of our lives.

I wanted to ask you about the relationship between ecological mentorship as dealing with precarity—as a great way to deal with precarity—and the chapter on “Dance Parties at Midnight,” because that's where the body and joy come into this web of relationships.

I'm thinking really about queer elderhood and celebration of survival, as this chapter talks about. For me, my friends outside of academia and just going to dance and going to celebrate—this is the type of mentorship I need right now that will sustain my finishing my next publication. It looks like, or feels like, it's not relevant to academia, but it is in so many ways because it relates to joy and to dealing with precarity and all these other things that really constrain thriving in the academy.

Leandra Hernández: Oh, 100%. What I love so much about how you just asked that is that it makes us remember that mentorship looks different and our needs look different depending on where we are.

Sometimes mentorship for me looks like a venting session with the comadres. Sometimes mentorship is all of us going to dance or going to a ceremony so we can just get showered with some incense and be in a space where we can breathe and be together.

To start with your question and go back to Mick’s ecological model, I'm also thinking about that at a meta level now. He engages with concepts of time, structure—both social and environmental—place and affect, and relationship. What he's really asking us to do here is to think about how we queer relationality. I think that's one of the most awesome theoretical and practical applications of the chapter, because he's thinking about queering world-making through queering relationality, or thinking about it differently: how can we support each other where they need it? What does that process look like?

I think too, in Chantal and Bryan’s chapter, that's how it comes up—“Queer Dance Parties at Midnight.” Let me just start by saying it's also kind of fun to think about the relationships I have with folks in the book. I don't know Mick very well at all, but Chantal is one of my closest friends in academia. She and I met several years ago. She's one of the most beautiful writers I know, and that probably came through in her chapter with Bryan. Bryan was one of her undergraduate students.

A lot of our collaboratives in the book are featuring undergraduate voices, which is something that I love so much. That was a side tangent, but in Chantal and Bryan’s chapter, they're really thinking, as you mentioned, about queer elderhood and queer connection and relationality as survival and joy.

The very first time I read Chantal’s chapter, I just immediately started crying. I remember writing back to her and saying, “I don't have a lot of edits. It just touched me meaningfully, and I think it's wonderful.” I think the reason I became so emotional when I read it—and you could probably relate to this too—is because queer elderhood is something that so many queer folks miss out on. So many of us don't know our queer elders. Maybe they passed away before we got old enough to know them. Maybe they never got a chance to be fully out or fully themselves before they passed away.

I remember at an NCA meeting when Anita asked, “Think about your queer elders,” and I just remember thinking, “I don't know who in my family was a queer elder. I think I might be the first one who's out,” which is sobering and kind of terrifying and also kind of sad. Most of the queer connections I made along the way were through friends in higher education and friends in queer outdoor spaces.

Chantal’s chapter with Bryan is specifically foregrounding the power of queer relationality and queer elderhood with a focus on joy. As we know, in higher education so much scholarship that engages with queer communities really uses a deficit model, or it has historically: “Here are all the things wrong with the queer community.” But Chantal and Bryan are deliberately flipping that script to highlight how queer joy is literally life-saving—and I use the term literally literally here.

I think it also connects to comadrisma and so many of the other chapters because it notes how, even in times of precarity, and especially in times of precarity, these sorts of connections help nurture us in ways that maybe we didn't expect and in ways that we may not be getting elsewhere.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah, absolutely. I think of my queer elders, and I actually think of my grandmother as a queer elder in many ways, as a woman growing up in the 1930s, ’40s. She always talked to me about sexuality and pleasure, and she would always remind me, “The women in my time were not supposed to talk about this, but I'm going to talk to you about this.” She lowered her voice, and I was like, okay, we're talking about this.

In many ways, she was this queer elder to me. This whole notion of dancing—one of the ways we would connect is she would watch the TV musical shows on the weekends. She was in a wheelchair and she would just dance right in her wheelchair and say, “Hold my hand.” I also really tear up a little bit about that chapter.

It reminded me that mentorship is not always just about guidance or survival, but also joy and resistance and living life. Sometimes we forget to live our lives when we're too caught up in the demands of the academy, whether they're demands for students finishing their degrees or dissertations, but also for us: publications and getting tenure and then getting full professorship and so on.

It really made me think about my own life and dance floors as sites of sanctuary. I was thinking about, I don't know if you read, the poem about the Pulse nightclub where the dance floor is called a church for those rejected by community or family. I was really touched by the dance floor as a space for collective resistance and learning from each other and supporting each other.

I really appreciate that chapter as well. So, Leah, how do you see joy and embodiment expanding feminist mentorship, and do you see joy connecting to frameworks like sanctuary?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. Oh, let's speak about sanctuary. Isha Dangerfield’s chapter on sanctuary was another one of those that, when I first read it, took my breath away.

As another fun mentorship aside, I met Isha a few years ago—maybe 2022—when I got invited to do a talk at the University of Memphis. She was one of the graduate students in that department. We immediately hit it off. We stayed in contact. We're still in contact now. We have had so many conversations about imposter syndrome. Isha is a Black feminist scholar. She's just a dynamite individual whom I care about deeply.

I remember her thinking, “What if this chapter maybe doesn't fit?” And I was like, “Girl, no. It's going to be the first chapter in the book.” The notion of sanctuary—I mean, like homeplace if we're building on bell hooks—Black feminist scholarship in her work and in so many others really is one of the main lifeblood lines of the book.

Isha theorizes sanctuary and home in multiple ways, which is also connected to joy and our feminist foremothers and those who came before us to help create the spaces for us to think about it now. Thinking about your story about your abuela: now that I think about how our own elders have queered cultural scripts, gender scripts, and so on—my grandma was twice divorced because her first two husbands, one of whom was my grandpa, was not the greatest person. Sorry, Mom, when you listen to this later, but there are family histories there, as there are in every family.

She was twice divorced with eight kids. She didn't even graduate from junior high, let alone high school or anything else, and she was thriving in all the ways. When I think about what it really means to be a strong woman who doesn't take anything from anyone, it was her. Even the queering of conversations and performances—her living on the dance floor at our family parties.

What it means to be or have sanctuary is, again, another one of those questions. For certain individuals, sanctuary is the church. Maybe for us in higher ed, our sanctuary could be our coffee shop or our shared working spaces together at conferences. Sanctuary could be the dance floor when we're like, “We need a break from the conference,” or something. It's another one of those powerful perspectives that contributes to the richness of the book.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: I really appreciate that you said, “What if this chapter doesn't fit?” and then you put it as the first chapter. It makes me think of what sort of practices don't fit in contemporary models of mentorship, and it makes me think of deviant mentorship.

Just to orient the listeners, this chapter argues that sometimes the best sorts of mentorship practices are those that deviate from traditional routes of mentorship. In my own work, I have an upcoming piece where I refer to this as calibrated disruption. To me, this is a strategic disruption rooted in care. It's not a disruption for the sake of disruption, but it's me showing and guiding my queer and trans students that you don't have to respond to violence. You can wait for the response to be an institutional response on your behalf, and that has more weight.

There's this calibrated disruption of grounding yourself. My piece is on intergenerational honey, because my grandmother was like, “You attract more with honey.” When you receive violence and mentorship feels like violence, you kind of want to respond with the same amount of violence because you're hurt. Sometimes it's like: let's move out, let's get away from this toxic environment, and rethink and recalibrate how we respond and how we disrupt that practice altogether. Rather than just responding to it, let's rethink this practice as a learning moment.

This brings me into this chapter of deviant mentorship. I think of this as intergenerational honey: care and strategy passed across generations—not just from familial practices but also across faculty and students, and thinking of ourselves when we were students and the experiences we had.

With that, I want to ask you about the possibilities that you see in deviant mentorship, and how it shifts how we hold ourselves accountable as mentors.

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. Oh, I love that. The chapter on deviant mentorship was co-written by a mentorship collaborative: Sam, Amanda, and Jenna. Jenna was the faculty member; Sam and Amanda were two of the graduate students.

Their chapter, like you noted, asks us to shift from thinking about feminist mentorship as an individual act—again, connected to Mick’s ecological notion—to shift from the individual act to a network of support. They build on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of troublemakers or making trouble, to ask us as readers to make trouble when practicing mentorship, reevaluating traditional mentorship approaches, and ultimately to show up for each other, literally.

For folks who have tenure to show up and use that tenure and privilege in ways that other folks don't. For those who have full to show up and use that institutional knowledge and support and power. For those who are younger. It really connects to your point so well of calibrated disruption, because disruption takes so many forms.

I can see your work being so helpful for several of my colleagues and graduate students, so I can't wait to share it when it comes out. I've been having conversations with folks where I tell them, “You don't have to do everything all the time right now in response to everything.” Disruption looks different on different days. It's constrained to certain factors by the institution and the space you find yourself in. What can your body do right now in this moment? What are the short-term things and what are the long-term things?

In connection to their chapter on deviant mentorship, Tori and Lindsay’s chapter on disrupting it—so we've got deviance, we've got outright disruption, again to various degrees—is also asking us to think about how, sometimes, even with the best of our intentions and abilities, folks still replicate some of those problematic power structures or issues.

I think their two chapters together help give us language to think about the micro-level and the macro-level actions of changing mentorship: shifting it from the individual to the collective level, and thinking about what we can do daily and in the long term to help make that change progress further.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yeah. If deviant mentorship is asking us to make trouble, it also raises the question: what comes next? What would it look like for institutions to embrace these practices not just as words, but in action?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. I have so many thoughts on this, and this is also partially rooted in my own lived experience having graduated with my PhD in 2014, working as a traveling educator because I'm a military spouse from 2014 to 2018, and then getting my first tenure-track job in 2019. There was a five-year gap between my PhD and my first tenure-track job. I have spent a lot of time as an independent scholar and on the tenure track thinking about this question.

I think it impacts our experiences in so many ways. How do tenure policies think about mentorship labor in the tenure process? How does that get quantified or qualified? Can we advocate to make it more recognizable as being related to research and teaching and service, not just being relegated to the 10% of service that sometimes goes unseen, when really for many of us it's like at 60% because of our identities and our experiences and relationships?

I think it also asks for us to consider mentorship at multiple levels, not just in the traditional vertical, top-down way of a senior scholar with a junior scholar or an advanced grad student with a new grad student, but thinking about it in more collective ways—mentorship collaboratives and networks for research and writing and service and space.

It puts pressure on the institution to really acknowledge the humanity and the holistic nature of our lives and our work, whether we are doing community-engaged work, organizing in different spaces, or running multiple grants in community-engaged spaces. What does that look like?

A huge part of my squawking over the last few years has been advocating, as one example, for book chapters to be more recognized in our tenure policies. This isn't just relative to this institution; I mean in the academic institution writ large. So much of our mentorship and our collaborative work is in these chapters, especially when they have a hard time getting published in journals because maybe the work is too experimental and not as traditional or as “formal” as they might like.

That's, I think, one of the micro-level ways that shows how, if institutions writ large shifted how they think about mentorship, it could impact multiple offerings and multiple policies—not just for faculty members, but also to support student-parents and students who are taking care of elderly parents. It impacts all of our lived experiences in multiple ways.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Absolutely. So, Leah, where do you see feminist mentorship headed in the years ahead, and what do you hope students or early-career scholars carry with them after they read this book?

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. For students and early-career scholars, at a base level, I want them to know that there are scholars and mentors who care deeply about this—and I mean deeply. Folks who utilize holistic approaches, ethics of care and love, comadrisma, solidarity, to show up and do the work.

I know we've talked about precarity a lot today, and I keep thinking about precarity in response to this question because I also hope that we in our spaces continue to explore what new theories and concepts we can use to give language and voice to mentorship, and also to keep showing up how it's best and most needed to support those who need it most right now.

I'm immediately thinking of our queer, trans, BIPOC loved ones and colleagues and siblings in this moment, and our students as well. So many of our communities need support and help right now. How can we take the conversation that we're having now, keep it going, and keep thinking about ways to radically transform and apply it?

Of course I'm thinking about bell hooks’ book Teaching to Transgress, and I've also been thinking a lot about “mentorship as transgression” as a metaphor and thought too, because our time right now is calling for it more than ever.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Absolutely. I want to turn back to you as co-editor. This book feels like a labor of love, but also one that must have taken a lot of energy and care. So my question is: what surprised, challenged, or sustained you the most in the process of bringing this collection together, and what's next for you in your own work on mentorship and pedagogy?

Leandra Hernández: As I mentioned earlier, this book was connected to our other book, Feminist Mentoring in Academia. When we released the call for book chapter proposals, we got so many that we had to split the book into two: one that is a slightly more interpretive, “traditional” feminist book, and then ours, which is the radical, queer, disruptive one—which is absolutely in line with the fact that I am first editor and my ethos for this book.

This book was also rooted in a time of extreme burnout for me, and I'm very forthcoming about that because I always try to tell those that I love that they need to realize it before they're so far into the burnout that they can't come out of it. I remember my spouse very lovingly telling me at one point in 2022, “If you don't figure this out, we are going to have a problem, and your health is going to have a problem, quite literally.”

That was my wake-up call. He said, “You've got to get back into climbing. You've got to get back into weightlifting. You've got to get back into reading things that are not for higher ed, because you are in the weeds, my dude.” And I'm like, “You're right, I am. What is going on?”

In the process of all of this, what really sustained me was rock climbing and hiking, which is one of my things, and going to a lot of concerts because I really love music. To your question about what sustained and what helps keep it going, it was really remembering why we were doing these projects in the first place. As I've mentioned before, co-edited books and projects for me are outlets for love, bridge-building, mentorship, and connection in so many ways that many of us needed then, but that we still need now.

AnaLouise Keating really captured that spirit in her foreword for the book without me even prompting her. I've never even spoken to her directly, but we wanted this book in her series because, as you could probably guess from the comadrisma chapter, Sarah and I utilized so many borderlands concepts and so many of those from Gloria Anzaldúa’s work specifically, that having AnaLouise Keating as the editor for the series, who was Gloria’s friend and collaborator, meant so much.

At the end of the day, in thinking about what's next: Sarah, our colleague Dr. Carlos Rincón, and I are working on developing comadrisma in relation to queer world-making. So, thinking about that more—more on that soon. I'm also working with a few incredible PhD students on building an oral history archive for the Salt Lake area Queer Climbers organization here at the Marriott Library at the U.

Here we're mentoring each other on how to do research, how to do oral history interviews, what it means to build an archive and do community-engaged work. If there's one thing I'll always be doing, regardless of where I am or what I'm working on, it's always focusing on those bridges.

Gloria Anzaldúa has this one quotation that, the first time I read it, really made me gasp. She says, “Voyager, there are no bridges; one builds them as one walks.” So whatever I'm doing, at whatever point, it's probably drinking some coffee and building some bridges—working on those mentorship relationships along the way.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Absolutely. And as I remind my students, there are some bridges that lead to nowhere.

Leandra Hernández: Yes.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: And it's okay to burn those bridges.

Leandra Hernández: Oh, preach. That's one of those calibrated disruptions.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: Yes. Leah, I just want to thank you so much for your words, your time, and the care that you put into this collection, along with your co-editors. What I carry from this conversation is that mentorship is lived, embodied, and political. It's about sanctuary, about naming the desires and needs, about building networks of care that help us not just survive, but thrive.

Leandra Hernández: Yeah. That's the goal.

Omi Salas-SantaCruz: And I hope the listeners leave with the invitation to practice mentorship differently, grounded in reciprocity, care, and justice.

Leandra Hernández: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you all for the invitation.

Scott Black: You've been listening to The Virtual Jewel Box. Our music is by Jelly Roll Morton, “Perfect Rag.” Thanks for joining us.