Radical Accountability: A Strategy for Addressing Challenges and Inequities in Research Mentoring Relationships

Abstract

In research-intensive fields such as psychology, research mentoring is a crucial component of academic and professional advancement. Research mentoring occurs when a more experienced person mentors a more junior person in research. Although these mentoring relationships have significant potential to address systemic inequities in psychology and academia more generally, some mentoring relationships do the opposite by further marginalizing women, People of Color, and Women of Color. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the absence of radical accountability is the root cause of many problems in mentoring relationships. Building on critical frameworks and corresponding empirical work, we conceptualize radical accountability as practice whereby mentors critically reflect on how power and privilege shape mentoring dynamics and take intentional steps to redress inequity. After describing radical accountability and its conceptual underpinnings, we engage in the feminist practice of reflexivity to describe how we—the authors of the paper—applied it in a recent professional endeavor. This discussion leverages the authors’ diverse professional and sociodemographic backgrounds. We conclude by providing practical recommendations for how mentors can engage in radical accountability.