This is a call for abstracts for a proposed edited book with Ashgate publishers, which has emerged out of a session at the recent Emotional Geographies conference (July 2015) entitled ‘Time, Temporalities and the Emotional Geographies of Being/Becoming a Mother’. The session was convened by Rachel Colls (Durham University) and Abi McNiven (Oxford University).
Abstracts should be 150 words (max) and sent to Rachel Colls and Abi McNiven by Friday 4th December 2015. The edited collection is interested in bringing together interdisciplinary research which considers the ways in which varied notions of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ are central to how, where and when mothering ‘takes place’. Such a focus also calls into question what constitutes mothering, becoming a mother and (imagining) being a mother and thus how this might felt and experienced. For example, this includes considering ways that the experience of being/becoming a mother is described in temporal terms through imagining, planning, predicting, waiting, routinizing and anticipating, and how the timing and spacing of mothering is understood in terms of the ‘quality of time’ as stretched, punctuated, monotonous, speeding/slowing, repeating, lost and so on.
We welcome abstracts for chapters which explicitly interrogate the intersections between mothering, time and temporality. Contributions can be theoretically and/or empirically focused and we are also keen to encourage more ‘creative’ contributions which might include presentations of and reflections on particular artistic engagements with the core ideas of the book as well as chapters written in non-traditional academic styles e.g. poetry or creative writing.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- What does it mean to ‘be’ or ‘become’ a mother? Maternal and non-maternal identities, including around voluntary and involuntary ‘non-motherhood’
- ‘Beginnings’ and ‘endings’: where does motherhood begin? Where, if at all, does it end?
- The knowledges, processes, practices and experiences of ‘becoming’/‘being’ a mother; for instance: conception, fertility, pregnancy ‘failure’, pregnancy losses, the use of reproductive technologies, surrogacy, ova donation, adoption and fostering, gestation, labour, delivery/birth, post-natal care, feeding etc.
- Spaces of mothers/mothering: medical, social/caring, capitalist; for example, hospitals, homebirths, Sure Start/community centres, parenting classes, maternity leave spaces, nurseries/schools, maternity shops, baby showers, etc.
- Notions of ‘waiting’ and ‘anticipation’: in conception, gestation, adoption, childcare, and so on.
- Mothering across the lifecourse and life events (of the mother, of the child): being/becoming a mother to an infant or teenager; mothering and relationship breakdown/divorce; being/becoming a bereaved mother
- Intergenerational mothering relationships: to one’s own mother and/or grandmother, between grandchildren and grandmothers, ‘motherly’ friends and family members, etc.
- Politicising motherhood, in relation to social issues such as funding cuts to support services, employment and in response to acts of violence/death
- Non-western and post-colonial feminist understandings of mothering and being/becoming a mother
- Discourses and figurations of motherhood in both the historical and contemporary context, for example concerning the figure of the ‘bad mother’ with regards to notions of maternal-foetal conflict and the stigmatisation of teenage mothers
- Engagements with non-linear feminist theorisations of time and temporality