The Association for Queer Anthropology is pleased to announce the details of our 2020 AQA Mentoring Workshop event!

Building on our successful mentoring event that was held at the AAA meeting in 2018, this virtual event will pair junior scholars, including advanced graduate students (ABD) and early-career professionals (postdocs and pre-tenure track faculty, including visiting assistant professors and PhD-bearing adjunct faculty) with academic and professional mentors, including current and former AQA board members. The goal of this event is to strengthen our AQA community by creating connections between a diverse group of early and late-career queer scholars with the hope of fostering long-term mentor/mentee relationships. We also hope that participation in this event will encourage more junior queer scholars to become active members of AQA.

Because the annual meeting has been canceled this year due to COVID-19, we will be conducting the 2020 AQA Mentoring Workshop online over Zoom. The workshop will consist of two one-hour meetings during which each mentee will be paired with two mentors for conversation. The first meeting will take place on Saturday, October 24 from 3–4 p.m. Eastern Time, and the second meeting will take place on Saturday, November 21 also from 3–4 p.m. The hope is that having two meetings several weeks apart will allow participants more time to better get to know one another and build up an ongoing relationship.

If you would like to participate in this event as a mentee and be paired with two potential long-term mentors from AQA, please reach out to me at caseymiller@muhlenberg.edu to get signed up! This event is free and is open to anyone regardless of current AQA or AAA membership status. People from underrepresented backgrounds in anthropology and AQA are especially welcome. More detailed event information to follow, along with Zoom meeting ID, passcode and link.

Many people have already signed up to me mentors again after an initial email was sent out earlier in the year, but we are still looking for more mentors to get involved! If you would like to participate in the workshop as a mentor, please contact me at caseymiller@muhlenberg.edu. If you have already signed up to be a mentor this year but can no longer participate due to the change in format, please also let me know.

Thanks so much for your support of this event, and I hope to see many of you in October and November! Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can provide any additional information about the 2020 AQA Mentoring Workshop.