Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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1824 research outputs found
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Problematic Intersections: Dance, Motherhood, and the Pandemic
Full text linkThe aim of this article is to create space for Canadian mother artists and academics in the dance field to discuss their experiences of mothering and working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversations relate to changes in or loss of employment and visioning for the future of this live art form in the aftermath of the pandemic. Artists are paid less, take longer to establish their careers and have less stability in their lives. These are only some of the reasons artists often choose not to have children. Infrastructure and support systems are not set up in the dance sector to assist caregivers. Since the body is the site of inquiry, the experiences of pregnancy, birth and the physical care of children are inextricably linked to one’s livelihood. There are overwhelming concerns around childcare, support systems and equity, which have only been magnified by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As dance moves forward, the problem is that mothers of young children are not necessarily available to keep up with how changes to modes of pedagogy and performance might impact us in this already tenuous field. They are with their children for a large portion of the day, as caregiving responsibilities disproportionately fall to women in all sectors, but especially in dance in which annual income and society’s value of the work is especially low. This writing endeavours to shine light on the struggles and breakthroughs of mothers working in academic and professional dance in Canada during COVID-19 and lay bare conversations we’ve historically participated in discreetly
Does the Place Where We Are Born Matter?
Full text linkUntil the middle of the twentieth century, most births in rural Ireland took place in the home. From then on, childbirth increasingly took place in hospital settings. Not only did this physical relocation of birth from home to hospital affect women’s lived experiences of childbirth and traditional midwifery practices, but both were also inextricably bound up with the complex relationship to women’s bodies and place within the evolving postcolonial Irish state.This article is an historical overview of the uprooting of birth from home to hospital in Ireland. It documents the main policy changes that led to the current obstetric-led, institutionally based maternity system. It highlights how this postcolonial state effectively erased traditional midwifery practices and eventually removed midwifery services from local communities. The subsequent centralization of maternity services led to a huge reduction in maternity units from 108 in 1973 to nineteen today; consequently, there is a very limited obstetrically driven maternity service, which is almost entirely hospital based.This research is part of my PhD, which is an interdisciplinary art practice-as-research project that uses methodologies employed by feminist ecocritical thinkers, new materialists, cultural geographers, and socially engaged art practitioners; it incorporates oral testimonies, archival material, film, drawings, paintings, and found objects. This complex layered reading of the interrelationships between place, birth, and memory will contribute to a shared knowledge, placing it at the intersection of international research in medical humanities and collaborative, participatory socially engaged arts practices
Frontline Workers from Home: A Feminist Duoethnographic Inquiry of Mothering, Teaching, and Academia during the Initial Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Full text linkIn this article, we use a feminist lens to discuss and critique the unique challenges associated with our multidimensional identities as Ontario elementary schoolteachers, mothers, and academics. Employing a duoethnographic method, we recount our personal lived experiences of mothering, teaching, and academic related tasks during initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We juxtapose our experiences at home, in our combined identities and roles, with the various levels of expectations set upon us. From the teaching front, these expectations include those from the government, school boards, and educational administration. On the academic front, there are the hidden expectations of writing and publishing, and being productive during mandated down time. At home, there are increases in domestic labour, caring for children and, for one of the authors, homeschooling. Taking into account the “Learn at Home” program, mandated synchronous learning, Ontario’s provincial approach to reopening schools for the 2020–2021 school year, and the literature on motherhood and academia, this article explores the nuanced experiences, barriers, and challenges that we encountered at the beginning and throes of the pandemic and into the unknown. The dialogic analysis of our experiences is rooted in feminist understandings of motherhood, teaching, and academia; it highlights the gendered issues of domestic and precarious labour, paid labour, caregiving, and mandatory social isolation
Indigenous Motherhood and Indian Hospitals: Exploring the Impact on Generational Indigenous Mothering Using Feminist Ethnography as a Decolonial Practice
Full text linkColonialism creates dehumanizing situations and alienates those who are colonized not only from themselves but also from their culture, language, and lands. Settler colonialism is defined as “settlement over Indigenous people and land” (Hart 25). Indigenous women in Canada were faced with colonizers who interfered with their matriarchy and egalitarian community values. Patriarchal views, which were at the core of colonialism, established controlling and eradication mechanisms in the form of “institutions such as Indian hospitals” (Brant 9). Both the physical and psychological abuse that was inflicted upon Indigenous women in Indian hospitals affected the mothering role and being mothered for both Indigenous women and children, which, ultimately, caused intergenerational trauma. Ethnographic storytelling and Indigenous feminism formulate a resistance as well as an activist stance towards colonial governments but also provide resources for a formal education for non-Indigenous people as part of a decolonial movement
Professional Challenges to Women as Educators and as Mothers
Full text linkThis article explores the dynamic between the professional roles of women working in early childhood education and their maternal skills and identities. This dynamic reveals a blurring of the boundaries between motherhood and career, which have similar requirements to provide protection, care, and concern. This study sheds light on the perspectives of mothers working in early childhood education regarding their personal and professional lives. It highlights not only the conflicts raised and prices paid by the women and their children but also the extent to which female educators bring their profession home with them, including their theoretical and practical knowledge. These women continue to act as educators at home, but the demands on them are multiplied in the private sphere, where they are also mothers. Moreover, the demands they place on their children can also be influenced by the private domain, making this relationship complex and conflictual. Oftentimes, the private life and children of a female educator are seen as significant aspects of the “business card” she is expected to present to the world in order to gain respect in her professional life. Specifically, this article explores how female educators who are also mothers experience the relationships existing between the professional and personal realms
Colour Tribulations: A Mothering-ArtAdemic in a Pandemic
Full text linkUsing personal narrative as a feminist approach to producing knowledge, I describe how living in a pandemic creates the ultimate experience to conduct arts-based research on gender inequality for artists, educators, and professionals as well as the effects the process of artmaking can have on grief, depression, and anxiety. From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I experienced the death of two family members. With the stay-safer-at-home order, I was thrust into finding a way to balance the roles of caring for multiple generations of my family, quickly moving to teaching online, attempting to teach and care for my daughters, and dealing with the deaths of two loved ones. The order of social distancing caused my personal grief to remain in a fog. As a Mothering-ArtAdemic (Nelson and Combe), I needed to find a way to successfully mother, create, and teach in order to remain strong and heal for myself, my family, and my students. After tending to my stay-safer-at-home duties as a Mothering-ArtAdemic, I empowered myself to paint every day. This series of abstract paintings is called Colour Tribulations, as I played with colour to fight off the anxiety, troubles, difficulties, and constant uncertainty of living in a pandemic. Each painting represents an attempt to find peace as well as a sense of safety and calm in the midst of COVID-19 chaos. The paintings conceptually work through the multitude of stresses and anxieties that accompany mothering and teaching in the midst of a pandemic and transform them into meditation, colour, and forms of art therapy
Birth Pleasure: Meanings, Politics, and Praxis
Full text linkLittle research has directly focused on the spectrum of pleasure experienced in birth, which until now has lacked a scholarly description or definition. In this article, I present the concept of birth pleasure and offer an introduction and preliminary definition synthesized from published experiential accounts, existing research and scholarship, and relevant lay literature. Through an intersectional and matricentric feminist lens, I offer implications of including birth pleasure in birth justice praxis
Care/Giving
Full text linkOpening the creaky door to my room with a laundry basket balanced on one hip, I walked into the room and plopped the basket down on the bed. Startled by the noises, my infant daughter woke and started crying. I had forgotten that she was there.Lost in my own thoughts, I had momentarily wandered from my constant stream of thoughts about her. Has she eaten recently? When was her last diaper change? Is she happy? Becoming upset? In need of a nap? Children make themselves hard to forget—they have endless needs. Like a baton in a relay, someone must always take the responsibility for care.“Take a baby, leave a baby?” my husband jokingly asks as he hands her to me so he can Zoom into a meeting. Yes, I’ll take her. And I’ll leave her when it’s my turn to work again. Especially in this time of quarantine when we’re both working from home and childcare isn’t an option, we care for one another by trading off Baby.These images depict mundane everyday moments of caregiving. Using personal family photos as a starting point, I create line drawings with an image transfer process. The drawings are then painted in watercolor. Much like the way memories become muddled over time, the process used imperfectly replicates the images and introduces visual noise
