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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“Trying to Function in the Unfunctionable”: Mothers and COVID-19
Full text linkThe central directive of the COVID-19 pandemic has been conveyed in two words: stay home. Yet there has been little media coverage, public policy, or social research on how families are managing under social isolation. Few have acknowledged, let alone sought to support, the crucial work mothers are doing as frontline workers to keep families functioning in these times of increasing uncertainty. Mothers do the bulk of domestic labour and childcare, and with social isolation, the burden of care work has increased exponentially, as mothers are running households with little or no support and under close to impossible conditions. Many mothers are also now engaged in paid labour from home and are responsible for their children’s education as schools remain closed indefinitely. Mothers have little to no respite from their 24/7 schedule, since most outdoor activities have been cancelled for children, and no one is allowed into their homes. Add income or employment loss, financial or housing instability, food insecurity, single parenting, abusive situations, or recent experiences of migration and the stress is amplified. The article explores the care and crisis of mothers under COVID-19 through an examination of comments and discussions on the Facebook group Mothers and COVID-19, which I set up over a two-week period in early May 2020. The article considers how mothers are managing the new requirements of motherwork under the destabilizing restraints of this pandemic. It also addresses and asks why the essential and frontline work of mothering in this pandemic has been so discounted, disregarded, and dismissed by governments, media, and the larger society. The article seeks to make visible what has been made invisible and render audible what has been silenced—the labour of motherwork under COVID-19—in order to inform, support, and empower mothers through and after this pandemic
Proving Our Maternal and Scholarly Worth: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Storying of MotherScholar Identity Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Full text linkPivoting to remote work as female academics and to schooling our children from home as mothers in March 2020 marked a dramatic shift in how we enact our MotherScholar identities. This collaborative autoethnographic study employs a modification of interactive interviewing and photovoice to produce verbal and visual text of COVID-19 MotherScholar identity work for analysis. Thematic analysis results in themes of maternal interruptions, professional interruptions, maternal recognition, and professional recognition. Of note, our MotherScholar interactivity functioned as identity work as we sought and granted legitimacy to one another’s’ COVID-19 MotherScholar identities. Of particular concern to us is how institutions of higher education are (dis)enabling socially supportive MotherScholar interactivity during COVID-19 conditions that persist at the time of this writing and how they intend to address social support needs sustainably into the future
The Poetry of the Pandemic
Full text linkThis autoethnographic essay is a co-constructed endeavour that documents how we—a MotherScholar and a Black Woman scholar—both used poetic inquiry as feminist methodology (Faulkner) in order to respond to and find reprieve from the emotional gamut we each experienced during COVID-19. Though not professional poets, we value the craft of poetry and found it most suitable to capture the emotional labour of performing our caregiving responsibilities as mother and grandmother in our respective home spaces while trying to maintain our (virtual) workloads in institutes of higher education. Poetry was an opportunity for us to make sense of our changing identities and unpredictable emotions while being constantly bombarded with experiences and roles we never asked for or ever anticipated confronting—at home or work.The poems vary in content and form in an attempt to capture the diversity of experiences we each encountered while attempting to weather the same storm but in different boats. Collectively, the poems speak to the competing messages of comfort and confusion we each received during this volatile and traumatic time. By sharing our lived experiences, we invite others to bear witness to our COVID-19 realities of being forced to care for everyone and everything while still trying to care for ourselves, and we hope that readers find solace in a shared story, adopt this selfinquiry method as a form of self-care, and/or are prompted to check on any and all of the mothers that are just trying to survive COVID-19.When home becomes your officeWhen work invades your kitchenWhen you teach other people’s children while your own children sleep twenty feet awayWhen online #crisisschooling is forcing you to choose between teaching your daughter math or being a good momWhen the incessant, unmistakable ding of emails demanding accountability for your time, your whereabouts, your productivity bombards your screen—What are you doing?! Show me! Count it up.Tally it.Tally it again in a different format.Tally due today!New tally in a different format for a different reason due tomorrow!!Convince me you are doing your job!!!Your care for your children better not be getting in your way!—while you try to focus on the comforting hum of students learning from youonline in another open tabWhen COVID-19 forces a nation to observe a stay-at-home order, when can a MotherScholar find her own space among the unsolicited, unreasonable, and unimaginable expectation to become all things, to all people, at all timesWhen the pandemic tries to tell you that you CAN’T be a mother and a scholar in the same space, at the same timeWhen?!Perhaps……in the stolen moments between feeding children and contributing in Zoom meetings,…in the margins of a work journal borrowed from her children’s bag of returned school supplies,Perhaps ……in the form of a poem. (Burrow
Viral Loads and Immunities: Reflecting on Neoliberalism, Motherhood, and Academia during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Full text linkThis creative, reflection paper explores neoliberalism in academia and motherhood, and it speaks from my position as a thirty-three-year-old mother of two young children (aged six and four) and as an ABD (all but dissertation) graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. My family and I currently live in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota. I am a white (Irish and Lebanese), and my husband is Black (from Uganda). I grew up in a single-parent household and my husband, who grew up in Uganda, was orphaned at a very young age. Though different in terms of our social environments, we both experienced debilitating poverty as children. As the pandemic ravages on and instability becomes familiar to us yet again, I explore the precarious situation of being captured in the neoliberal pressures of education and motherhood while attempting to artistically and intuitively explore spaces outside of these realms to better my relationship with my work, my children, my body, my partner, and myself. I explore these concepts alongside the COVID-19 pandemic and how the entanglements of neoliberalism, work, motherhood, academia, and racism intersect in my family’s lives. I also explore the role mothers (myself included) have in supporting family health, as well as the outside pressures, that create tension in the achievability of optimal family health and wellness. I explore these issues context of the current pandemic and the current racial and political climate in the United States as I raise my mixed race children during this time
Identity and Connection as Working Mothers during the Pandemic: An Autoethnographic Account
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected working professionals around the world, causing many to alter their identities to cope with their current realities. This article explores the effect the pandemic has had on the identity of two mothers, who are also working professionals/educators. Using a heartful autoethnography approach, the authors implement the listening guide method of analysis to authentically understand how these mothers experience identity and connection while working and parenting during this worldwide crisis. The listening guide approach involves the creation of “I-poems,” which are included and explored in the current article. The listening revealed four main themes: (1) mental load and exhaustion; (2) conflicting identities; (3) shame cycle; and (4) connection and reflection. The goal of this manuscript is to highlight the experiences of working mothers through an authentic and relational approach
Reflections of a Chinese Academic Mom Struggling to Survive a Pandemic
Full text linkEach of us has been negatively affected by this pandemic, but mothers have had to shoulder the brunt of it, as they have been forced to work from home, provide child/elder care, and ensure that their family survives. Sadly, academic mothers have been burdened not only with an increased workload at home but also with trying to juggle their academic careers, which have been gravely affected by this pandemic. As a Chinese academic mother, I have struggled with managing my publishing requirements, my service to my department, and my online teaching responsibilities. I have had to care for elderly family members, who are more susceptible to COVID-19, and for my children, who have been exposed to COVID-19. I have also had to work through filial piety failures as a daughter and daughter-in-law. Sharing the struggles of academic mothers aims to expose how the exorbitant workload that falls upon academic mothers is not sustainable and to address systemic problems that have been long plagued both the academic and home environment. All mothers cannot continue to support a system or a government that lacks leadership during global crises that do not value the visible and invisible labor of mothers because women have far too long been viewed as disposable. In sharing my experiences during this pandemic as a Chinese mother and academic navigating through this uncharted territory of pandemic survival, I hope my journey can provide support to other academic mothers as we advocate for structural change in how mothers should be supported as essential workers
“Good Mothers” Breastfeed: Discursive Constructions of “Good Motherhood” in Infant Feeding Health Promotional Material in Ireland
Full text linkThis paper focuses on discursive constructions of “good motherhood” in discourses of infant feeding in contemporary health promotional material in Ireland. The study examines the multisemiotic composition of two pamphlets on breast and formula feeding, routinely given to mothers in Ireland after having a baby. These pamphlets are analysed using a model of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) in order to produce a comprehensive examination of the key discursive strategies and semiotic choices employed by the producers of these texts to influence parents’ decisions about infant feeding. The paper examines how mothers’ choices with regard to infant feeding are constrained by the positioning of breastfeeding as the optimal choice, and the discursive legitimisation of correlations between the practice of breastfeeding andthe ideal of good motherhood. It also highlights that these discursive strategies and semiotic choices are underpinned by discourses of attachment parenting, totalmotherhood and neoliberal risk culture.The paper argues that the health promotional texts which form the basis of this study, are part of a wider discourse of breastfeeding which is an ideologically infused moral discourse about what it means to be a good mother in an advanced capitalist society. It further concludes that the question of choice, which is central to so many women’s issues, is notably absent from the discourse of infant feeding, a factor that can have a strong negative impact on the wellbeing of new mothers
The Challenges of Being a Mother and an Academic Researcher during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil
Full text linkMothers all over the world are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Academic mothers, particularly, have been struggling with deadlines and productivity demands. In fact, mothers are experiencing the most challenging time in the recent history of Brazil while working and mothering children from home. In this paper, we argue Brazilian academic mothers’ challenges, which were already pervasive and inherent in Brazilian society before COVID-19, have become even more taxing due the current right-wing government’s policies in the pandemic that have exacerbated existing inequalities. Based on a literature review and quantitative and qualitative data, we present key findings of the ongoing research project—“Brazilian Mothers, Media, and COVID-19”—to illustrate the difficulties the pandemic has caused for Brazilian mothers. We note how patriarchal motherhood still shapes the ways many of Brazilian women mother their children, as they remain isolated, deal with maternal roles individually, and have little social or governmental support. Finally, we highlight the need for Brazilian mothers to learn how to mother their children with media literacy and conclude by bringing some hope to this unacceptable scenario by encouraging further collaboration among academic mothers in Brazil