Historically, the term mentor has carried with it expectations of relationality, longevity, and politics—not necessarily identical to but not completely unlike the “elder” distinction that marks some cultural contexts as distinct. The term has also carried with it bona fide positive and negative associations. In western antiquity, Mentor (Μέντωρ) was not always cast as a favored figure, though he enjoyed positive notoriety in the Odyssey in part because the goddess Athena disguised herself as him on a diplomatic mission to Telemachus, son of Odysseus, at the end of the Trojan War. Various heroic and less heroic archetypes followed Mentor into modernity as the Odyssey itself underwent various tellings and retellings, eventually becoming a cultural trope on which to base assumptions about how authority should equate to wisdom and how future generations should be trained. In contemporary higher-education contexts, mentoring is more often than not used to commodify unmet needs, For these reasons and more, not everyone loves the idea of mentoring, or the term itself.

The CFSHRC and FemRhet conference team are genuinely excited about welcoming you to James Madison University in November for Feminisms and Rhetorics 2019, for what promises to be an exceptional conference due in no small measure to the extraordinary efforts of this year’s conference hosts. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the real problem that conference costs pose for a growing number of us – graduate students, contingent faculty, and academic workers of all ranks and roles who have experienced recent furloughs and/or ongoing salary compression.