Figurations of Mentorship for Cultural Work

As cultural work becomes increasingly precarious and digitally mediatized, we ask how mentorship can continue to play a crucial role in shaping how the know-how of cultural work is organized and shared. Drawing on a case study of a mentorship program for cultural work taking place in Greater Vancouver, Canada, we propose conceptualizing mentorship as a figuration, which we describe by tracing three interdependent threads: a constellation of actors, frames of relevance, and communicative practice. Focusing on the constellation of actors, we analyse how the mentorship spans across a dynamic network of actors whose connected presence shape the sharing of the know-how and distributed knowledge among heterogeneous mentors and mentees. Turning to the frames of relevance, we find that mentorship is much more than a means of skill transmission. Instead, it is a site where struggles over the meaning of know-how for cultural work – frames of relevance including skill, creativity, and social justice – take place. Finally, by foregrounding the communicative practice for the figuration of this mentorship, we illustrate how mentorship is facilitated through various layers of digitally mediated exchange which reconfigure traditional notions of guidance and support for sharing experience and knowledge for cultural work. Reconceptualizing mentorship as a figuration allows us to move beyond accounts of dyadic relationships between an individual mentor and a mentee working in co-presence, and instead recognize the relational, institutional, and technological dynamics that structure contemporary cultural work. Ultimately, our findings suggest that, through the figuration of mentorship for cultural work, mentors and mentees can still share meaningful collective experiences and knowledge, which expands our understanding of the know-how necessary to practise cultural-work and how it is shared.