On Tuesday, Oct. 3, Mari Castañeda, professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, conducted a workshop on collaboration and faculty mentorship at the CIP. Castañeda focused on establishing a social justice praxis in academia that promotes the productivity, personal development, and professional success of all participants.
To explain her feminista-inspired framework, she used the analogy of a tamaleando, a traditional gathering in which women of different generations work together to make tamales. As in the tamaleando, Castañeda and her academic collaborators work toward a common goal, share resources and knowledge, engage with each other personally, make distinct contributions to their projects, and take turns in leadership positions and supporting roles to make a fair distribution of both labor and credit.
She and her partners have created small online writing groups that keep members active and accountable through teleconferencing software, shared their personal experiences with professional development in collaborative documents, and given each other feedback on writing in progress. These groups have developed structured incentives to encourage participation from faculty at different levels, such as mutual mentoring grants, support letter exchanges, and sharing back of publication revenues to sponsoring departments; they have even taken the benefit to community partners in consideration to make their projects as inclusive as possible.
After her presentation, Castañeda met with Kenyon faculty to discuss plans for applying the framework to their own academic collaborations.