Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)Not a member yet
1824 research outputs found
Sort by
Maternal Mental Health and Mindfulness
Full text linkMental health problems result in disease and disability (Afifi 385). When looking at the data across cultures, women are more likely to report mental health symptoms, access available supports, and receive treatment for mental health disorders (Lesesne and Kennedy 755). Research on maternal health has suggested that “the burden of mental health disorders peak in the child bearing and midlife periods” (Lesesne and Kennedy 756). Biology is often implicated in this presumed psychological vulnerability, given that throughout a woman’s life, she experiences pronounced hormone-driven cycles, including menstruation, pregnancy, a postpartum period, and menopause. However, even after exhaustive studies exploring a number of sex-related variables, there is a lack of consensus regarding the significance hormones have in influencing women’s mental health challenges (Hendrick et al. 93; Schiller et al. 49). Some scholars contend that the focus on biology and hormones are an easy way to discount the negative experiences that disproportionately affect girls and women. Discrimination, poverty, sexism, abuse, exploitation, and caregiving burdens work to undermine women’s mental health. Women’s mental health should, therefore, be understood by evaluating all aspects of women’s lived experiences—physical, sociocultural, economic, and interpersonal. Informed by the diathesis-stress model, this article reconsiders the social, political, and economic stress that adversely affects women’s wellbeing. Specifically, this article posits that Buddhist-derived interventions, such as mindfulness, can fortify and empower women. Evidence from neurobiology provides a meaningful framework supporting this approach to health and wellness
Academic Single Mothering during a Pandemic
Full text linkMothering during the pandemic has crystallized the preexisting gender gap in academia. Whereas previous studies have shown that women with children are significantly less likely to achieve full professorship than their childless or male peers, recent studies have already found evidence of a gender gap in productivity during the pandemic and several articles have been published on this topic by academic mothers struggling with having to juggle childcare, homeschooling, and academic duties from home. However, these papers and studies focus on partnered academic mothers, further exacerbating the invisibility of single mothers. Using my own experience as a single mother to five-year-old twin boys who left an American university for an Australian one during the pandemic, along with experiential accounts by other single academic mothers from the Facebook group “Single Parents in Academia,” this chapter highlights the specific challenges faced by single mothers during COVID-19 in a transnational context, both in and outside of academia. It also suggests avenues for solutions and improved policies to mitigate the single motherhood double penalty through a comparison of the lockdown regulations across three countries (France, the United States, and Australia). Its goal is to give visibility to single mothering, which has been further marginalized by the pandemic and its accompanying media discourse and emergency measures
Are You Looking for Madame or Maman? Role Playing the French Professor and the Mother in Academia
Full text linkSince becoming a parent, the last six years have been the most exhilarating and exhausting in the personal and professional spheres of my life. My heart was brimming with love following the birth of my first daughter while my brain was sending me stress signals to begin preparing for a tenure-track position in French at a small liberal arts college the next month. After the birth of my second daughter, and a year marked by injury, illness, and applying for tenure, I began to feel a growing sense of urgency to connect with other academic mothers.In this article, I share my personal journey as a female academic and mother with the aim of contributing to a wider discussion about maternal health and parenting in the academy. I reflect on the tensions originating from the roles I inhabit as both professor and mother—roles that have appeared to be at odds with one another from my job search through the tenure process. I have come to realize that I am happiest when I am able to see the various facets of my identity overlap in ways that invite knowledge and experience to nurture each other. I have sought to make my dual roles as professor and parent visible to my students by narrating various experiences raising my daughters in a bilingual home, by bringing my daughters regularly to campus, and by living in France together as a family while working with study abroad programs
Challenging the Invisibility of Queer Young Mothers
Full text linkThe social identity category of “young mothers” refers to a diverse and marginalized group, which has been socially constructed by dominant political and faith-based regimes in Western society. For youth who identify as queer young mothers, multiple vectors of oppression result in the erasure of their identity and material needs, contributing to reduced access to appropriate healthcare which impacts the quality of their health and wellness and the health and wellness of their children. In this article, I argue that although the visibility of queer pregnant and parenting youth is an important step in order to collectively establish particular material needs, that recognition alone is not enough. Collaborative advocacy efforts must take an intersectional approach. I place two texts into conversation with one another: Gayle Rubin’s essay titled Thinking Sex and Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr’s retrospective memoirstyle essay, titled The Revolutionary Artist Mom and Baby League: Putting Young Queer Parents on the Map, which centres the voices of youth who identify as queer young mothers. By placing these two texts together, political factors relating to both sexuality and gender, as well as age and economic status, are made apparent, allowing one to trace how and why this group is rendered invisible by communities that serve young mothers and by communities that support queer parents. I then discuss how the combination of these two texts establishes a clear need to collaboratively advocate with queer pregnant and parenting youth to ensure that their particular material needs are met. I explore an intersectional approach to advocacy, and I suggest a sense of direction with respect to advocacy efforts for the needs of youth who identify as queer young mothers. In support of my argument, I draw from feminist theory, contemporary motherhood studies, and queer studies
Learning from the Experiences of Mothers of School-Aged Children on Tenure Track during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic
Full text linkHow are mothers of school-aged children navigating the tenure track in the global pandemic of COVID-19? In this article, I weave my reflections with the voices of other early career academic mothers of school-aged children to tell our varied stories traversing tenure. To access these stories, I conducted synchronous and asynchronous (email) dialogic interviews with six early career academic mothers of school-aged children from a variety of disciplines, departments, and universities in North America. Although COVID-19 will likely have much longer lasting implications, this article focuses on how participants felt in March 2020 when COVID-19 physical distancing plans were widely implemented. As the interviewees suggest, time was negotiated, reorganized, and felt in different ways among academic mothers of school-aged children. There were innumerable factors shaping the various responses to COVID-19 lifeworld reconfigurations while pursuing tenure, and my hope for this article is twofold—that others are able to feel seen and heard and that universities might begin truly listening to the voices and experiences of nondominant faculty to consider reorienting their tenure cultures to be more inclusive of the diverse lifeworlds their faculty inhabit. Importantly, in their commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, universities ought to be reflecting on the cultures and temporalities of tenure to better attend to the decline in numbers of women through the professorial ranks. Particularly in heightened times of uncertainty and intensification of historical gender inequities compelled by the global pandemic of COVID-19, this article introduces some considerations for differently approaching and reconfiguring individualist and competitive tenure processes
Unseen Roles of Women during COVID-19: How the Echo of an “Mummy, I Love You” from a Six-Year-Old during a Zoom Meeting Redefined Mothering
Full text linkI was in my last year of my doctoral studies, my children’s school plans were scheduled, and I had just begun a new research collaboration when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. My roles as a mother, researcher, and educator, which once segregated by time and place, collided when our university closed. Every aspect about each role merged, and my professional and personal world collided in an online meeting. This is a visual essay consisting of photographs, artwork, and poetry collected during the pandemic as I journeyed through my doctoral journey at home. I invite the reader to read my spoken words aloud and allow your experiences and emotions as a mother(parent), a researcher, and educator to permeate the space around you
The Continuous Clock: A Working Academic Mother during COVID-19
Full text linkMy vision for maternity leave was quickly flipped upside down, as I had our second daughter on March 13, 2020. Amid the most significant pandemic of my lifetime, I was not prepared for what was to come over the next several months and how it would change the trajectory of my career. As a fulltime faculty member at a university, I am heavily involved in both teaching and research. During my maternity leave, I was planning to be home with my newborn for a few months while sending my older daughter to daycare. This bonding and recovery time are critical for both mom and baby. However, as universities closed, I no longer had the assistance needed to facilitate my research, nor did I have childcare. That burden was now placed back on my shoulders soon after delivery. COVID-19 has had significant effects on both the plans and expectations of mothers in academia. This piece will touch on societal expectations of mothers as well as the discrimination they have faced in academia during this crisis. I will tell a personal story as well as share stories from my peers about women’s (and men’s) roles and responsibilities for the family, while managing expectations as university faculty members. Four themes emerged from the qualitative interviews: productivity vs. efficiency, opportunity vs. challenge, collaborative parenting vs. parenting alone, and the repercussions from COVID-19 and responses to them. It is an important time to describe the personal and professional setbacks academic mothers have faced because of this pandemic
The New Normal? Work, Family, and Higher Education under COVID-19
Full text linkAccounts of the social and economic changes brought on by COVID-19 describe these changes as the “new normal.” I argue that these changes are actually an extension of existing trends. For five decades, neoliberal reforms have resulted in the privatization and corporatization of everyday life, reshaping social institutions in the process. Of these institutions, the contemporary university is particularly important because it is both a workplace and a training ground in which neoliberal norms around competition, achievement, and individualism are enforced and promoted. This situation has socialized a new class of professionals to be productive workers who expect very little from their government, which is particularly problematic for women attempting to balance work and family life. To explore what this means under pandemic conditions, I draw on the life of Angelica, a woman who traded a life of drug addiction and welfare dependency for college attainment and professional work. College should have liberated her; instead, it has left her with a demanding job and little to no institutional help. I compare what is expected of Angelica as a college-educated working mother under the pandemic and what was expected of me as a professor and mother before the pandemic, suggesting important continuities in the pace of work, the nature of care, and the expectations of the self and others
Pregnancy and Pandemic
Full text linkIn this article, I examine through personal narrative my experience as a sculptor, arts educator, and pregnant woman during the COVID-19 crisis paired with comparable stories and anecdotes collected from other pregnant women’s experiences during the pandemic. I hope to explore the effects—social, mental, and career related—of being at different stages of pregnancy during this international crisis. Working in a collaborative environment, such as an art studio, I have gained tremendous support over the years from fellow women, some of whom are also mothers, on how to navigate the ins and outs of working in fine arts academia. Now with the current pandemic underway, these resources are still present yet distant, as they virtually manage and maintain their own family units and careers.The 2019-2020 academic year was also my first year in a tenure-track faculty role. I am curious about the effects of COVID-19 and the additional effects of being pregnant in a pandemic. What toll will this crisis take on my career as a young female educator and on my perspective as a new mother? I have gathered information from other pregnant women who are experiencing pregnancy during this crisis and have included their statements in this article. I am interested in perspectives of women both in arts-related careers and outside of the arts as well. Although my voice and experience may be the dominant thread throughout the writing, the unifying theme will be of the resilience of the female mind and body, especially during these dynamic and precarious times of pregnancy and pandemic