Social Justice Mentoring and Scholarship: Building a Community of Leaders and Advocates

Abstract

In this 2018 Janet E. Helms Award for Mentoring and Scholarship keynote address, I speak about the importance of social justice mentoring and scholarship as a way to build communities of leaders and advocates. First, I contextualize my journey as an international student and an Asian Indian woman existing within multiple social and cultural locations. Second, I highlight those individuals who have influenced me on my academic journey. Finally, I share how my experiences, research, and clinical work have shaped my mentoring style and my desire to “pay it forward.”

Decolonizing and building liberatory psychological sciences.

“…Conducting ethical, decolonizing research demands care and meaningful engagement with the communities in which researchers cocreate knowledge. People must be socialized into the importance of relationship • Employ healing and culturally responsive research practices (Lee et al, 2021) • Learn about, train in, employ, and promote antiracist, emancipatory communitarian approaches to conducting scientific work (Miller et al, 2019;Prilleltensky, 1997) • Adopt standards of critical and learner-centered pedagogies that reject the nonreciprocal banking method typically found in classrooms (Freire, 1970) • Establish ethical, reciprocal partnerships with antiracist and social justice-oriented community organizations (Heppner, 2017;Inman, 2018;Neville, 2015), an aspirational approach to mentorship that involves "finding ways to provide [mentees] opportunities to develop efficacy in working individually and collectively toward social justice goals" (Neville, 2015, p. 163). This approach is highly generative in facilitating relationships.…”