The Diversity and Inclusiveness Beat is running a two-part mini-series titled “Building Online Community and Mutual Mentorship.” This mini-series is co-authored by Cheryl Frazier (College of Southern Maryland), Jeremy Fried (College of Southern Maryland), Stephanie Holt (Wofford College), Sherri Irvin (University of Oklahoma), Babak M. Khoshroo (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), and Camilla Palazzolo (University of Genoa), all of whom belong to a work-in-progress group that has been running successfully for eight years. All have research interests in various aspects of aesthetics, including bodily beauty, aesthetic agency and incarceration, philosophy of music, AI and creativity, contemporary art, pop culture and intellectual property, and the connection between aesthetics and justice. This post is the second and final installment.
Giving and receiving feedback can be a vulnerable process. Writing is deeply personal, and it takes great trust to share your work with the world. Yet, this is a vital part of philosophy and academia more broadly—whether while developing and defending a dissertation, submitting manuscripts and putting on a brave face as you read through Reviewer 2’s comments, or when presenting work at conferences and workshops. A strong, supportive community to cheer you on through the writing process, and to help you strengthen your work, can make an otherwise daunting journey much more manageable (and dare we say, even fun!).
Feedback is key, but knowing who to go to and how to get that feedback can be difficult. Talks at conferences are sometimes sparsely attended, and the wait time for feedback at larger conferences like APA meetings can delay the writing process. Colleagues within our departments may have very different interests and expertise, and you may not want colleagues who will be evaluating your performance to see your roughest work. For those seeking constructive feedback in a supportive environment, we recommend developing a virtual work-in-progress group whose members offer a flexible, open-minded, vulnerable community for writing.
In a companion post, “5 Practical Tips to Revolutionize Your Work-in-Progress Groups,” we propose some practical tips for getting this kind of group started (and keeping it going). In this post, we’ll unpack why this group works by examining how our commitment to show up for each other—and for ourselves—over the years has been solidified. We’ll reflect on the values, activities, and mindsets that have led to a powerfully supportive community and propelled our members to continue research even in the face of acute life challenges. We hope this will inspire others to consider new models of mutual mentorship and explore strategies for building successful online communities.
Background on the Group
We are a group of 6 philosophers, most of whom have been meeting regularly for 8 years to read each other’s work in progress and support each other professionally. Our group started somewhat by chance. In 2018, Sherri moved from her faculty role at the University of Oklahoma (OU) into an administrative position that soon proved all-consuming. She was worried about losing touch with her doctoral students or being unable to mentor them adequately, so we started having regular group meetings. These began in person at a large table in the building her administrative office was in, a short distance from the philosophy department. When COVID hit in spring 2020, we switched to Zoom, and we have continued to meet on Zoom ever since.
Though the group started as a faculty member’s strategy for mentoring a group of doctoral students, it has evolved far beyond this as Babak, Cheryl, Jeremy, and Stephanie completed their Ph.D.’s and moved into academic positions, and a new grad student member, Camilla, joined in spring 2025, when she spent a semester at OU working with Sherri. All group members other than Sherri have moved away from Oklahoma.
We continue to meet every two to three weeks and have seen each other’s projects grow from (very) rough drafts to dissertations, conference presentations, and peer-reviewed publications. We value “pushing the peanut forward”: making small increments of steady progress that build up over time. Just as important, mentorship and care flow in every direction. Our activities started as advising meetings, but became a source of community among people who share values and want to see each other succeed. This group has shaped how we engage professionally more broadly: how we give feedback, how we teach, and how we support students and colleagues dealing with anxiety about sharing their ideas. We believe our interactions have changed our approach to philosophy for the better and hope that by sharing our strategies we might help others have the same positive experience.
The group’s core activity is exchanging drafts of our work and receiving feedback. The group often sees multiple drafts over a period of years from initial conception to dissertation completion, presentation, and/or publication. We sometimes look over referee reports and other feedback that members have received from outside the group, either to brainstorm how to respond or to give feedback on new drafts responding to the feedback. When no one has new writing to share, we read and discuss work written by others that relates to a group member’s research interests. This sometimes resembles a typical reading group experience and sometimes is more targeted at helping group members integrate or respond to the outside work in their own research.
As research can be a difficult independent process, we have incorporated strategies to help provide motivation and accountability. Sharing our own research with the group provides natural deadlines, but we have also engaged in mutual accountability challenges modeled on the 14-Day Writing Challenges hosted by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity: in a shared Google doc, we log our writing time daily, answer a few questions about how our process went, and enter encouraging comments on each other’s posts. We also have explicit discussions centered on productivity methods and strategies, detailing what has been successful in our research journey.
Our activities have also focused on other aspects of philosophy as a profession, allowing us to practice important parts of life in academia in a supportive environment and preparing us for essential parts of the job that are often not included within standard graduate school training. We have worked as a group to referee manuscripts, learning norms and best practices for service to the discipline. We have supported each other in preparing job talks, cover letters, portfolios, and teaching/research statements. We take time to discuss our experience in a variety of professional situations and challenges related to publication, the job market, teaching, etc. Having an ongoing place to discuss these topics throughout the various stages of our graduate studies and careers has allowed us to learn from the experience of group members as well as reflect on our own experiences through sharing.
Our activities are responsive to group members’ needs, both professional and emotional. We occasionally schedule meetings, particularly over summer and winter breaks, just to check in with each other. These meetings tend to feature some future planning, but mostly focus on updates from each group member. Here, and at the beginning and end of every meeting, we share professional and personal successes and setbacks. We celebrate and grieve important life events together. The group intentionally pursues interpersonal support.
Reflecting on the group’s long-term success, we recognize the emergence of shared values that shape how we interact. Working groups are often described in terms of structure or productivity (for example, how frequently they meet or how goals are established), but our experience suggests that the ethical and relational foundations of the group are equally important. Practices such as offering generous feedback, creating a space for vulnerability, adapting to the changing circumstances of members, and recognizing the needs of each participant, both philosophical and personal, form the basis for a group that can truly support its members in academic life. These values did not emerge from an explicit discussion, but developed spontaneously through the behaviors we observed and progressively modeled for one another over time. Reflecting on them retrospectively helps clarify what sustains the group and why it continues to be meaningful for us. Articulating these values can also be useful in successfully integrating new members, making it clear from the outset how the group functions and what kind of interaction and support can be expected. We’ll now reflect on four key values and how we realize them: flexibility, vulnerability, mutuality, and open-mindedness.
Value 1: Flexibility
Flexibility is a central value that allows the group to sustain itself over time and adapt to members’ changing circumstances. Academic life requires constant adjustment: teaching schedules shift from semester to semester; administrative duties, conferences, research travel, and personal or family commitments can all reshape weekly availability. For this reason, our meeting times are periodically renegotiated to ensure that everyone’s needs can be accommodated. We use scheduling polls and prioritize finding the “golden hour” that works for everyone, even across international time zones now that Camilla is back in Italy. Willingness to reschedule meetings so that everyone can participate is not only a practical adjustment but also a meaningful gesture of mutual recognition and care.
We sometimes pivot in response to people’s needs in the moment. When someone is preparing materials for the job market, we help with those. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, we dedicated a meeting to discussion of coping and productivity while we were sheltering in place and working remotely. What we needed at that time, more than any feedback on specific work, was to talk to each other about how to manage our new reality, so that’s what we focused on.
Flexibility within the group also manifests in how shared texts are received. There is no fixed rule about when a piece of work is sufficiently “ready” to benefit from comments. On the contrary, members of the group are encouraged to share materials even at very early stages, when ideas are only partially developed or the structure of the text is not yet fully defined. For Jeremy, this flexibility has been vital in getting several projects off the ground. He has a forthcoming chapter in a volume on Taylor Swift that was initially presented to the group as a sketch of a potential project. Getting feedback and insight on which aspects of the project the group found most interesting helped him tailor his Taylor writing in subsequent drafts. Having a place where people are willing to give constructive feedback on even the roughest of drafts and at the earliest stages of projects allows him to pursue ideas that might otherwise never leave the idle musings phase.
This openness reflects a form of mutual acceptance, whereby the value of each contribution does not depend on completion or polish. We recognize the importance of seeing projects throughout all stages of their development, valuing provisional drafts, notes, or sections that are still sketchy. In this way, the group becomes a space where the writing process can be shared in its most authentic and vulnerable dimension, allowing participants to receive support not only when a project is already well formed, but also at moments of uncertainty.
Value 2: Vulnerability
Our group’s success is in no small part due to our willingness to be vulnerable with one another. Sharing writing is, in many ways, an intimate process. Many of us incorporate personal narrative, our cultures, and advocacy for communities that we care for deeply into our work (which is, admittedly, atypical in much of traditional academic writing). This makes the feedback process all the more vulnerable, as we are sharing parts of ourselves and have to trust others to respond with care. We have worked through highs and lows, both in our research and in our personal lives. We explicitly discuss and share the realities of the research process—the heartbreak of a desk rejection after pouring weeks of time into a project, the thrill of an acceptance after a series of challenging R&Rs, and even the frustration of writer’s block.
In academia we are so used to seeing only the successes of other scholars. We witness the conference presentations, read accepted publications, and cheer on our peers when they get hired to a new position. Sometimes, it feels like you must be the only one who is failing all the time, especially as a scholar who is earlier in their career. Seeing that others’ journeys are similar, and that even some of the most respected scholars struggle with their work, makes it easier for us all to be vulnerable about the writing process (and other parts of academic life, like the job market). When Sherri shared that she got a desk rejection for a paper we’d all read and loved, it came as a surprise given her strong track record of research. But it helped remind us that rejection and revision are inevitable parts of research, and should not be a reason to give up on a project. When Jeremy and Cheryl submitted a co-authored project to the same journal several months later and their manuscript was also rejected, remembering Sherri’s experience became a source of comfort and helped motivate them to keep working on the project, with the knowledge that they could revise it and find a journal where the project would be a better fit.
For Cheryl, the group’s vulnerability has been a vital part of her decision to stay in academia, despite often feeling out of place in philosophy. One notable experience was when she was working on a very personal project on fatness, in which she argued that philosophers need to undergo a more radical mindset shift in how we approach the topic in the field. This project drew from her first-person experiences as a lifelong fat person, and also required her to engage critically with research by more senior members of the discipline. She struggled for months to bring together a first draft (even to the point of having to cancel a speaking engagement where she was supposed to present an early draft!). The difficulty of confronting the oppression she had faced in virtue of this identity, and the emotional toll of having to engage with literature that was at times dehumanizing, left her ready to abandon the project. But thanks to this group, she knew she had a space to discuss those feelings and blocks to writing explicitly. The group held space for her tears, offered practical support about navigating the emotional toll of personal research, and gave thoughtful and constructive feedback about how to move forward with the project given the barriers she was facing to figuring out the “right” structure for the piece. The space the group makes for this kind of intimate expression of grief and difficulty writing as a marginalized scholar is a rare gift—something that we don’t typically find at a philosophy conference or in a department colloquium talk. Although others who try to build similar groups may come in with different emotional and logistical barriers to writing, and with different lived experiences, they can take away from this example a lesson on the importance of holding space for writers to share the full experience of the writing process (the good, the bad, and the ugly).
Here is another point where our values reinforce one another. Our vulnerability and openness about the realities of writing help us to maintain flexibility. When we are reading very early drafts, our conversations often evolve into talking through underdeveloped sections to help one another move past writer’s block, figure out a pathway forward, identify rich examples that could bridge the divide between sections of the project, etc. Without an existing foundation of care and mutual responsibility, it would be more difficult to find the courage to share unfinished work, and to admit transparently that we need help figuring out parts of the project where we are stuck. Each time we share these more “drafty” drafts, we are also setting the expectation that this is a space where we are all accepted and valued as we are, where vulnerability is not only welcomed but encouraged.
Our willingness to share what is going on in our lives outside of the group/research, and interest in one another’s lives, helps make our vulnerability possible. It also helps remind us that behind the drafts we are reading, there is a real person—a person who may be navigating the difficulties of parenting, or the loss of a loved one, or concern for their family and friends in the face of current events. This leads us to treat each project with care and compassion. It also helps reinforce the sense of mutual duty to show up for meetings, and to be fully present during them. Knowing that your peers have made real sacrifices in their busy schedules, and that they are choosing to devote time to your work and to supporting you, helps motivate you to reciprocate that care and investment in the group.
Both Stephanie and Babak have become parents since joining this group. For Stephanie, who had just started at OU when the group formed in fall 2018, the pandemic and a twin pregnancy that followed it made it difficult to feel connected to her peers. While we all felt the impact of the pandemic on our ability to connect with others, a high risk pregnancy and tending to two premature infants afterwards further constrained her ability to engage with her peers and participate in academic spaces such as conferences or workshops. When Stephanie decided to move away from Oklahoma to be closer to family support for her children, she could have been at risk of losing touch with her academic peers altogether. Our group became a lifeline to her ability to continue the Ph.D. in the wake of such huge life transitions. The consistency with which members of this group have continued to check in with one another, share work, and plan future meetings was the only sort of consistency Stephanie experienced throughout her Ph.D. studies. She would not have been comfortable showing up to a research group during such a volatile time in her life which was merely a research group, incapable of holding space for each other as full people with lives outside of our academic work. Our group is both flexible enough to adapt to whatever is going on in each of our lives as needed, and caring enough to be a part of our lives, not just our academic lives. Even our partners and family members know about this group and its importance and impact in each of our lives.
Value 3: Mutuality
To show our mutual responsibility towards one another, we strive to model respectful presence. With very few exceptions for emergencies, we all keep our cameras on and actively work to resist checking our phones or email. Our single, short hour together is precious. Making a conscious effort to be present in the conversation, and to keep our energy focused on supporting whoever is sharing their work, helps us show up for one another and, in turn, motivates us to come back week after week, since we know others respect this time and see it as valuable.
Part of showing this respect for one another’s time involves being mindful of everyone’s commitments. To ensure we can engage thoughtfully with the readings, we send out our work about a week prior to the meeting where we’ll discuss it. Though last-minute writing is an academic trope (writing the conference paper on the plane to that very conference), this does not lend itself to the careful, thoughtful reading that makes our group a success; nor does it show an understanding of participants’ lives outside of the group, which may limit their ability to read a last-minute paper.
Our group has thrived in part because it is a non-hierarchical space where all members are equally committed to being vulnerable, supportive, and open to expanding our understandings of philosophy and its methods. So often in education, the person with the most seniority is seen as the ultimate authority, who dictates what is discussed and how we discuss it. Given that this group was initially started by Sherri as a way to check in with her graduate students, and was a pragmatic tool for all of us to move forward in the difficult journey of dissertation research, it would have been easy for the group’s format and expectations to come directly (and exclusively) from Sherri as our advisor. Instead, each of us was given the agency to determine what we wanted (and needed) the group to be. Mentorship often has a one-directional, hierarchical relationship, but in our group, all members are treated like equal partners whose needs and strengths are invaluable assets to our community. Sherri sees the other members of the group as essential readers for her research projects and has learned and grown as a scholar, mentor, and person through the mutual respect and care this group offers. In particular, she has learned that being open about vulnerability, struggles, and failures can help reassure others that these experiences are part of the research process and fully compatible with a successful career.
This non-hierarchical dynamic has manifested itself in how our sessions operate when someone is sharing their own work. From the beginning, our emphasis has been on asking the presenter what they need from the session. At first, Sherri asked this explicitly at the beginning and end of each session, encouraging us to reflect on how we wanted to use our hour of meeting time, and whether we had gotten the support we needed as that hour came to a close. Now we are in the habit of proactively sharing this information ourselves—often emailing our drafts along with the questions and concerns we have about the project to help guide people’s feedback. Rather than Sherri telling us what the project needed and what we should focus on (which could have been natural, given her role as dissertation advisor), we were actively encouraged to develop our own voice and to have more autonomy over our work and time together.
Camilla’s experience of joining the group as a new member illustrates how this commitment to non-hierarchical, reciprocal engagement is realized. She joined in January 2025, entering a community that had already been working together for several years. Joining such a well-established group can be intimidating, as long-standing collaborative dynamics may make new members feel like outsiders. The first time she clicked the Zoom link to attend a meeting, she felt intimidated and worried that she had nothing meaningful to contribute. Since English is not her first language, she worried about not being understood or about boring others. However, this was not her experience. From the beginning, she found an environment that felt respectful, open, and genuinely welcoming. She was made to feel like a full participant and felt comfortable contributing, asking questions, and actively engaging in shaping discussions. Her work was received with the same attention and engagement as that of other members. Finding such a welcoming environment strengthened her desire to keep participating in the group and contributing to its conversations. Her experience shows how important it is for new members to feel like legitimate participants right from the start.
All of us have a mutual responsibility to show up for each other and to model these behaviors. Although we all understand that people may have personal circumstances or emergencies and might miss a meeting, a trust and confidence have developed and increased over time that we value each other’s work and time and are here to support each other.
Value 4: Open-mindedness
Related to the above value, we have also valued open-mindedness regarding the topics and methods of philosophy and the nature of philosophical texts. Jeremy’s main research is in copyright and intellectual property. However, he has brought projects on Taylor Swift, titles of works, and philosophy of sport to the group. He’s currently working on a fun piece about a TikToker who rolls dice to select the ingredients for unique sandwiches he creates. He brought a draft to the group with hesitation about it being a worthy subject, and the group’s open-mindedness and enthusiasm encouraged him to continue pursuing the idea, which has expanded into questions about the vicarious experience of watching other people eat. For Cheryl’s work, she frequently draws from her lived experiences as a fat person. Her research often draws on her access to “fatshion” (fat fashion), experiences of medical fatphobia, and interactions with loved ones as a fat person, as well as first-person narratives and testimony from others in less traditionally “academic” sources (e.g., blogs and social media). Babak’s work on aesthetics draws in part on his lived experiences in Persian culture, specifically as a practitioner of Persian traditional music. In recent years, based on his background in computer science, he has focused on normative and aesthetic questions surrounding AI. In his recent project on AI creativity, he draws on empirical studies on machine learning and ethnomusicology. Although a major part of this research was far from the group’s research interests, all the members willingly read his work and helped him develop his paper through their supportive feedback.
In reading each other’s work and giving feedback, we do not start from an assumption about what a philosophical work should look like and then try to bring a work in progress into line with it; instead, we focus on how the author intends to approach their problem and what help they need from the group. This has helped us not merely give feedback on each other’s work, but also (and more importantly) support each other in deepening our own approach to philosophical problems in accordance with our lived experiences.
Open-mindedness is also connected to our willingness to share our thoughts without worrying about being judged. This empowers people to speak when in other contexts they might be more shy or reluctant. The environment is understood as mutually supportive for both the author of a given work and everyone who is participating. For Babak, who is originally from Iran, sometimes it is hard to understand the cultural nuances of discussions related to American culture, but the group atmosphere has allowed him to feel secure in asking for more information or clarification to remain an active participant in all discussions.
We have all had experiences of misfitting, of feeling “othered” in philosophy—whether because of our identity, experience and background, or because our research interests and methods differed from those of our peers. Having felt the sting of being treated like we did not belong, or sharing work we were proud of only to be met with questions about whether it was “real” philosophy, we’ve all sought to expand our discipline and to welcome fellow misfits. Although we each put forth these efforts in our individual professional lives (e.g., through the curricula we build, the conferences we attend, or the way we interact with colleagues), we have also invested our time in building a community that meaningfully changes what philosophy is and could be. Through this group we have learned about what doing philosophy entails. We have learned to write and respond to referee reports, how to negotiate a job offer, and how to give comments on a talk at a conference. But we have also learned that philosophy can be so much more: it can be a way to connect to our communities, improve our lives, and extend care towards others. What started as a group to learn the ins and outs of philosophy through the support of our advisor has become so much more—it has become a chance to build the home that so many “misfits” in philosophy long for.
We hope that sharing our wonderful experiences will help others create similar groups to explore creative ways of doing philosophy in a caring professional community. For practical tips to get started, see our previous companion post, “5 Practical Tips to Revolutionize Your Work-in-Progress Groups.”
Cheryl Frazier
Cheryl Frazier is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the College of Southern Maryland. Her research focuses on aesthetics, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy, as well as Fat Studies. She is especially interested in norms surrounding beauty and appearance, and expanding appreciation of marginalized groups in art and our aesthetic lives. Recent work includes a chapter in An Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Community, and Experience (2026), and a chapter (co-authored with Jeremy Fried) in Bridgerton and Philosophy: Dukes, Debutantes and Deep Questions (2026). When she is not doing philosophy, Cheryl enjoys spending time with her cats and making linocut prints.
Jeremy Fried
Jeremy Fried is an adjunct professor at the College of Southern Maryland. His research focuses on aesthetics, philosophy of law, philosophy of race, and their intersections with popular culture. Recent work includes a chapter with Cheryl Frazier in Bridgerton and Philosophy: Dukes, Debutantes and Deep Questions (2026) and a chapter in College Sport Ethics: Challenges, Questions, and Opportunities (2025). He enjoys spending his free time with his cats and trying new foods.
Stephanie Holt
Stephanie Holt is an assistant professor of philosophy at Wofford College. Her research focuses on aesthetics, political philosophy, and applied ethics with an emphasis on issues related to incarceration.
Sherri Irvin
Sherri Irvin is Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on aesthetics and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022) and editor of Body Aesthetics (2016). She is interested in the intersection of aesthetics and justice, both in art and in everyday life.
Babak M. Khoshroo
Babak M. Khoshroo is an instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence, especially questions about creativity and artistic practice. Drawing on his background in computer and data science and Persian traditional music, he examines the normative and aesthetic dimensions of AI.
Camilla Palazzolo
Camilla Palazzolo is a PhD student at the University of Genoa. Her research focuses on contemporary art, with particular attention to the relationship between its ontological and phenomenological aspects, as well as to the philosophical issues of restoration, conservation, and the accessibility of cultural heritage.
