Mentoring That Fell Apart

This autoethnographic article explores the author’s experiences of navigating a science education doctoral program at a research university in the United States. It problematizes social identity and power dynamics inherent in mentor–mentee relationships in higher education and becomes a tool for the author to recover from the disruptive encounters that she faced during her graduate studies. Drawing from the epistemic injustice framework, this work presents the author’s critical reflection in the form of introspective poetic inquiry and invites the reader to pause, reflect, and take away what matters the most to them from this work. This work wants the reader’s interpretation, critical self-reflection, and emotions to be the main takeaway, not the author’s. It concludes by emphasizing the overlooked vulnerabilities in mentor–mentee relationships in graduate education and calls for a focus on equity and social justice in learning and teaching spaces in higher education.