Care Across Academic and Geographical Margins: Feminist Mentoring, Ethnic Minority Women, and Fieldwork in China
Abstract
Doctoral supervision is often conceptualised as a dyadic transfer of disciplinary knowledge, thereby obscuring the material, affective, collective, and spatial labour through which students become academic subjects. This paper develops a feminist ethics-of-care analysis of a supervisor-centred doctoral research group at a Chinese university. The group has comprised 13 doctoral students, including 12 women; eight women identify as Uyghur, Bai, Manchu, or Tibetan, and several undertake educational fieldwork in ethnic minority regions. The proposed qualitative case study integrates interviews, reflexive journals, selected fieldwork accounts, and group documents. It advances collective mentoring ecology as a framework linking material support, intensive intellectual feedback, peer relations, professional sponsorship, and fieldwork brokerage. Care is treated not as inherently feminine or benign, but as a power-laden practice that can redistribute the conditions of academic participation while also generating indebtedness, dependency, and constraints on dissent.
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