Mentoring at the Boundary: Interdisciplinarity and the International Student of Color in Communication

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss mentoring within the discipline of Communication by centering international scholars, who are translated as people of color in the U.S. and are engaged with questions drawn from the context of their nations of origin. How do you enable such a scholar to traverse boundaries – national and disciplinary with the selfassurance that ostensibly comes from feeling at home? Briefly discussing the history of the institutionalization of Communication as an academic discipline, I ask what it means to mentor scholars of color engaged with transnational work within a space that centers the nation-state as a bounded territory, in general and the U.S. in particular. Drawing on transnational and women of color feminist theorization and praxis, I also draw out the productive collaborations and relationships forged when mentoring reveals the processes through which the discipline reiterates its boundaries.