Museum of Motherhood Call for Papers

“Mothering from the Margins”
Deadline for Submissions November 15, 2016
St. Petersburg, FL
10-11 February 2017
Calling all social scientists, women’s, sexuality, and gender scholars, masculinity studies scholars, motherhood and fatherhood scholars, artists, performers, and those interested in caregiving and motherwork more generally for a creative and critical dialogue around the concept of “mothering from the margins.”
Each individual and family engages in care practices from a specific social location, made up of a multitude of intersecting and co-constituting identities that are accompanied by significant privileges and oppressions. For many, motherwork takes place from the margins of society, where individuals and kin networks that do not conform to dominant family structures find themselves. We aim to consider the experiences of oppression, the possibilities for empowerment, and the impacts on individuals, families, and children when people mother from the margins. Of special interest are the following topics: LGBTQ+, queer, and alternative kinship structures; teen and young adult parents; racial minority and multiracial families; transnational caregiving and undocumented families; motherwork from and within marginalized faith communities; adoptive, blended, and multi-household families; caring for or as differently-abled or neuro-atypical; single mothers; low-income mothers and families using public assistance; conceiving and parenting after miscarriage or child death; and negotiating in/fertility; as well as those who do not identify with normative-retro-patriarchal versions of mothering and caregiving. What are some of the ways mothers can speak up, speak out, and perform with ferocity?
We welcome submissions from scholars, students, activists, artists, community agencies, service providers, journalists, mothers, and others who work or research in this area. Cross-cultural, historical, and comparative work is encouraged. We also encourage a variety of types of submissions including individual academic papers from all disciplines, proposals for panels, creative submissions, performances, storytelling, visual arts, film, music, audio, and other
alternative formats.
All participants are encouraged to submit their presentation, post-conference for publication in the Journal of Mother Studies (JourMS), in August of 2017. See more at JourMS.org
SUBMIT ABSTRACT ONLINE [
LINK]
Thank you to last year's partners: TC & Manhattan College