In this monologue, Jan Blommaert’s long-time collaborator in different roles (student, colleague and friend) Jenny Van der Aa reflects on the intricacies of mentor-mentee relationships in academia. She crafts a space in which trust, intimacy, role play and generosity are carefully examined. She ultimately wants to lay bare structures of power that enhance and parachute, but that at the same time also restrict and stigmatize.

Dr Jenny Van der Aa is Senior Researcher and linguistic anthropologist at the Universities of Kampen (NL) and Leuven (Belgium), where she is involved with projects covering topics such as informal learning, church practice and the poetics of ‘integration’. Her most recent work deals with ethnographies of poverty and integration and will be published by Palgrave-MacMillan in the Spring.