The personal narratives were constructed by the authors who are a subset of a larger mentoring network of approximately 17 women academics. Our group of seven women came together based on our interest in multicultural education. The Table 1: Multicultural Group Participants provides an overview of the authors’ cultural backgrounds, geographic locations, and current professional rank.

We utilized the metaphor of the rhizome and its principles (discussed below) to construct composite narratives from an amalgamation of I/we personal narratives. These narratives made up the primary source of data. Notes from meetings were also used to document the flow of our collaborative work to conceptualize this article and write a proposal for its presentation at a conference. The data in this study were collected through the use of technology (e.g., E-mail, Google Docs, Dropbox) and group discussions (face to face, online, conference calls). As a result of an early discussion (2012) among three to seven group members on a conference call (three met face to face) lasting 2–3 hours, we came to a shared understanding of how we initially related the metaphor of the rhizome to the question of thriving in academia in relationship to our participation in an informal mentoring network of women. We left the discussion with these shared understandings.

1. Rhizome: A metaphor for the development of relationships that are not obvious/above the surface for everyone to see.

2. Running Bamboo: A rhizome that develops underground and also on the surface.

3. Fertilization: Addresses the question of how we nourish and sustain our collaborative relationships (and vice versa).

During a subsequent phone conference that occurred approximately six to nine months after these initial engagements with the metaphor of the rhizome, four of the seven authors created a prompt to generate narrative responses. By this time, we were to have read the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 198715. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

View all references) and supporting material related to this text. We created a prompt from the perspective that rhizomes can be a problem, for like weeds (i.e. crabgrass), they threaten to overtake a space. We posted our prompt to a virtual word processing site on the Internet, and all seven authors responded to it (source: meeting notes):

During a meeting by phone in the summer of 2012, we discussed the possibility that not all of us would embrace our position as problematic. We ended the discussion with the acknowledgment that the prompt was to inspire a response and whatever response it inspired was data to be analyzed as fodder for making sense of how we perceived our positionality and the value of the mentoring network or this subset: the multicultural group. The phone conferences that we engaged in over a year included from three to seven participants, lasted approximately one to two hours, and occurred approximately seven times. The frequency was recorded in our account with a phone conferencing company.

We used Deleuze and Guattari’s (198715. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

View all references) rhizome metaphor to describe our mentoring group. The rhizome spreads horizontally underground with each new bud becoming a new and different root system making it difficult to determine where it starts or ends and, thus, becomes challenging to remove. The six principles of rhizomatic thinking are: connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania. A description of each principle is included in Table 2: Principles, Sample Excerpts from Responses to Prompts, and Themes.

The authors responded to the prompt in the form of personal narratives, which make up the primary source of data. Each author then completed a table of five rhizomatic principles as described by Deleuze and Guattari (198715. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

View all references). The principle of decalcomania was least evident in the narratives and discussions (notes from meetings among the authors). However, one author addressed this principle directly in her narrative. Each group member then extracted illustrative sections of their own personal narratives they believed best reflected their interpretation of the principles in relationship to (a) the problem statement and (b) the mentoring network. Last, group members (in pairs, except for the principle of cartography, for which excerpts were extracted by one author) created a composite narrative from all seven authors’ responses to the table of principles. Table 2: Principles, Sample Excerpts from Responses to Prompts, and Themes represents a sample of how the data were organized; each participant extracted a statement from their individual narrative representing each rhizomatic principle. This iterative process allowed each author the intellectual space to interpret the principles and make meaning through them as they engaged with the problem statement. Notes from meetings were also used to document the flow of our collaborative work from its conceptualization to writing a proposal for its presentation at a conference and revising it in preparation to submit it to a journal for review. For instance, during the writing process, we discussed in a meeting by conference call that we had not described our cultural backgrounds. This discussion resulted in each author selecting one statement from the composite that they felt represented their experience and inserting it along with information about their cultural background.

I am a woman—African-American/Mexican-American—hyphenated and slashed. I embrace the idea of being a problem: a wicked problem, a problem for a culture where White men thrive and Women of Color struggle to survive. I have been encouraged to create underground spaces and “experimentation in contact with the real” to open blockages to open conversation. I am becoming more of a problem the longer I am here and the more others come to know me. I can be more disruptive when I am outspoken about equity. As a “transplant” into a more conservative community with deep roots of historical racism, I experience, I know more about the influence of history through the stories of those who are middle-aged and grew up here and raised their families here, and the college students who come from metro urban areas, and smaller towns.

I do share my experience and problems with other female faculty or in collaboration with women researchers across cultures. They give me professional, personal, and emotional support. The connections are strong and flexible. I am here to stay. With others in the mentoring group, I have forged a connection (multicultural group)—which is not necessarily a problem. Mentoring plays an important role in helping new academics understand the steps it requires to be successful in academia. Its connections and growth thus remain strategic and structured with varying outcomes based on the characteristic and strength of institutional alliances. Mentoring in our group is rooting and shooting (networking): building alliances through mentoring using technology. This network is based on reciprocity, professionally and personally.

As a woman who hails from the Balkans, my journey crosses cultures (Cluttterbuck, 20078. Clutterbuck, D. (2007). An international perspective on mentoring. In B. R. Ragins & K. E. Kram (Eds.), The handbook of mentoring at work: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 633–656). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

View all references; Fletcher & Ragins, 200721. Fletcher, J., & Ragins, B. R. (2007). Stone center relational cultural theory: A window on relational mentoring. In B. R. Ragins & K. E. Kram (Eds.), The handbook of mentoring at work: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 373–400). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

View all references) and is marked by risk taking, dialogue, and horizontal relationships (Darwin, 200012. Darwin, A. (2000). Critical reflections on mentoring in work settings. Adult Education Quarterly, 50(3), 197–211. doi:10.1177/07417130022087008
[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]
View all references). I do not see the academy as open and flexible, and so I welcome my problematic status. While my relationships in the mentoring network are rhizomatic, mapped by intersecting and analogous experiences, commitments, and values, they are also marked by the tenure clock—looming and booming in my head. At this stage of my career and not yet having earned tenure, I see limited opportunity for deterritorialization. Being in the company of women who are strategic and unapologetic in their alliances and networks helps to ensure that our physical and emotional health are intact.

Our mentoring group is flexible, dynamic, reversible, and open to new ideas and questioning. It allows women with common experiences of marginalization to collectively challenge the core of scholarship. These mentoring opportunities provide a framework for resistance, voice for minorities, and scholarship of hope. In the underground there is a greater shared support in which some of us (women and minority faculty) can nurture the actions any one of us takes to counter the more oppressive nature of being regarded as a “problem.” While there may not be a systematic change realized from these efforts, there is more individualized empowerment fostered. There is a sort of “decalcomania” or transference of courage that is supported when together we enter the territories of those unlike us.

As Women (of Color, that being, Afro-Caribbean in my case) and cross-cultural allies, we have to be vigilant in our pursuit of authentic support and challenge contrived attempts to break us apart and rupture our being—our existence. Academia is marked by isolation and working in your own discipline. However, I am still on the tenure track. I don’t have time/energy to fight or bring up a big discussion of problems. I feel sad and powerless that I have to be in “defense” mode all the time in my professional space because of my “female, Person of Color, and immigrant” background. Despite the isolation that can be contrived in the academic culture, there are varying layers of support. Our work together signifies a new path from one that was broken/interrupted by others. There is certainly some resistance to change in the academy despite the growth of new ideas, methods, and ways of thinking. Mentoring can be a sounding board and practice session for consciously taking a risk knowing the potential consequences. We are creating new lines of connection-building the network to decrease isolation within the academy, professionally, emotionally, and geographically. Engaging in this kind of mentoring that in itself cuts through structures and thus breaks them signifies a different direction—an example of women’s ways of knowing, i.e. that there are better ways of working and supporting each other. Our network provides a space for becoming and rerouting; a process which collectively facilitates an ultimate sense of rupture while advancing new lines or modes of thought. In the final analysis, mentoring can help us to avoid isolation or provide new growth when we are displaced or distant.

Upon my arrival to this institution as a White woman from the west coast relocating to the Deep South, I recognized an immediate territorial wall around diversity with regard to race and the identity of womanhood. Informal mentoring was the lifeline (as a new transplant to the region) during my cultural transition to a more conservative status quo. Working against White privilege and dismantling institutionalized racism means deterritorialization and it impacts every institutional structure. When I am successful (i.e., tenure and promotion, national recognition) my existence as a problem is lessened a bit. Suddenly I become “good” enough to be associated with those who are not viewed as problematic, namely my White, heterosexual male and sometimes White female colleagues. I, like rhizomes, seek supportive/rich “soil”—break paths and interconnect at multiple points of entry to engage in a supportive network. It is critical for me to create and embrace the authentic networks that provide refuge. Some things don’t need to be said because we all just get it and shake our heads. I claim an engaged pedagogy (Bussey, 20086. Bussey, M. (2008). Where next for pedagogy? Critical agency in educational futures. Submitted in the fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of the Sunshine Coast.

View all references; hooks, 199427. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to trangress: Education as practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

View all references) of collaboration, and through the liberatory expressions found through informal mentoring among women of color rhizomatic multiplicities give way to buds that break through and intersect with fellow women who work for justice. As a network of smaller networks or nodes, a problem we face is remaining connected over distance and with the larger group. We need to make our connections stronger to support the deterritorialization of the academy. We can do more (but what)?

The negotiations of this multicultural mentoring group have resulted in personal narratives and our interpretations of them have revealed some tangible and intangible benefits to us in our attempt to flourish in academia. The tangible value of participating in the mentoring network is in the opportunities it affords us to fulfill tenure and promotion expectations. The global mentoring network addresses the expectation for mentoring that some institutions have for tenure earning faculty. For example, the tenure guidelines at least in one of our universities state that tenure-earning faculty will engage in mentoring as an indication of quality teaching. We have created opportunities to present and publish.

The intangible benefit of participation in this peer-mentoring group has been mainly in the psychosocial and emotional well-being we perceive it offers to us currently or will offer in the future. A major theme in the personal narratives is that this benefit results from our informal connections and the personal/professional integration they provide. Speaking metaphorically, these connections and expressions strengthen us to run like bamboo. At least that seems to be the primary sentiment we have communicated. However, our feminist post-structural framework compells us to trouble the seemingly unified sentiment that appears neatly packaged in the composite. In the next section, we acknowledge the tensions that arose.

During phone conferences that occurred as the time to present at AERA in 2013 neared, tensions surfaced. Even when we (6:7) met in person to finalize our presentation, we did not address the tensions that were subtly communicated during recent phone conferences. After the presentation, while working to move from presentation to publication, we discussed that tensions were felt but we did not address them. Simultaneously, e-mails across the mentoring network ensued that also communicated that tensions were felt in other subsets. Instead we (and the mentoring network) continued to write, agreeing to address the tensions in subsequent projects. There is the possibility that the pleasantries that occur in virtual relationship do not translate the same once group members enter more intimate spaces where facial expressions, gestures, and other modes of communication become perceptible. A question to consider is whether by operating primarily in technospace, we avoid some of the challenges of working collaboratively across differences such as racial identity. While technospaces allow us to focus on a task and communicate mostly through crafted, written communications, this primary mode of communication and collaboration may have stifled more instantaneous verbal exchanges that would occur in more intimate venues or within smaller groups of people. In other words, it may be more difficult to build trusting relationships necessary for peer mentoring groups that operate virtually. The importance of building trust in order to sustain mentoring relationships among women has been noted (Stanley & Lincoln, 200551. Stanley, C. A., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Cross-race faculty mentoring. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 37(2), 44–50. doi:10.3200/CHNG.37.2.44-50
[Taylor & Francis Online]
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