Mentoring across difference: success and struggle in an academic geography career.

This autobiographical account of a black female feminist geographer's experiences with mentoring and success in the academy offers analysis, lessons and strategies. My distinctive graduate school experience, with a pioneering all-female feminist geographers dissertation committee, plus a complex mix of intentional and fortuitous multidimensional mentoring has contributed to a successful academic geography career. Yet, I've had to overcome obstacles stemming from intersections of gender and other forms of difference, primarily race and immigrant status. Although there are limits to mentoring practices that emphasize caring and collegiality, I highlight and recommend feminist-inspired mentoring strategies that forge alliances across race-ethnicity, gender, nationality, generation, institutional and locational differences as interventions that lessen the struggles, challenges or marginalization reported by many foreign-born black feminist geographers and other women of color in US institutions of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]