Shifting from replication to recognition and care: a prescription for improving graduate student mentoring in political science

Abstract

ABSTRACT Political science recognizes that it has a problem in recruiting and maintaining scholars from historically excluded groups and turned to the catch-all solution of “mentoring.” In this paper, we argue that those mentoring strategies are a means for neoliberal assimilation and replication, rather than supporting those scholars from historically excluded groups, which is why the leaky pipeline persists. Utilizing the results of an original survey we fielded in 2018, we prescribe that mentors adopt a pedagogies of care approach (Motta and Bennett 2018) to minimize the harm of the current system on those PhD students and early career faculty who do not fit the ideal worker image.