ABSTRACT
To emphasize creative relationality and hesitant, becoming questions of knowledge within mentoring processes, especially in academic contexts, this chapter positions mentoring as a series of relational encounters which are always philosophical and, in some ways, connected to the context of qualitative inquiry. These philosophical encounters can be initiated by thought and care and always speak with hesitation and manifest in the same time-spaces. Mentoring as a series of philosophical encounters functions through active creation yet uneasy relationality. The ongoing creation of events, responses, relations, relational selves, ways of togetherness, and co-living offers invitations to sketch and imagine. Rather than setting up an a priori and highly regulated mentoring relationship, mentoring as a philosophical encounter strives toward the relational and experimental, and returns without promises. In this chapter, we draw examples from mentoring in higher education to illustrate how mentoring may function as a condition for possibility and a living practice that is self-posing and self-creating while concerned with multiplicity and various relational affects.
