Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Term Time: A Revolutionary Lexicon for Mother-Demics – A Performance Text
Full text linkTerm/Time/A Revolutionary Lexicon for Mother-Demics was first performed as part of the ResearchWorks Series at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, England, on Monday, February 24, 2025. In this written publication following the performance, we begin with a note on the fonts readers will encounter herein. Taking a cue from the typographical polyvocality of mothering in Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers (1998), the performers, Dr. Laura Bissell and Dr. Lucy Tyler, express themselves in three typefaces. Lucy’s typeface (and her speech acts in performance) is a font often used in children’s literature: Gill Sans. Laura’s typeface is Grotesque, acknowledging the historical connotations of this term with birthing bodies. A third typeface, Segoe UI, is used to demonstrate the mother-demics’ collective speech. Segoe UI is the typeface of the web and desktop app Microsoft Teams, the forum for the mother-demics’ communications. Herein, we appropriate Segoe UI as a speculative organizing typography of mother-demics. We begin the performance now. 
Mothering without My Mother: A Psychotherapist’s Journey
Full text linkEarly mother loss leaves one lacking guidance, nurture, and advice, much like a ship endlessly looking for its lighthouse. How does one process the world after they have been robbed of the experience of having a mother? The author, a perinatal psychotherapist who lost her mother in adolescence, offers an examination and reflection of the multilayered ways that the loss of her mother has affected her and shaped her choices in life. To understand mothering, she becomes a mother-focussed therapist before then becoming a mother herself. She uses her own experience to share and describe the conscious and unconscious manifestations of grief, highlighting the confusion and perpetual longing that come with loss that occurs before one’s identity has had a chance to fully develop. The author incorporates research on motherless mothers, ties concepts from mother and infant attachment to motherlessness, explores the power and subtlety of continuing bonds, and examines the impact that media parental representations can have on a person’s loss and grief, as well as bonding. The finality of loss is juxtaposed with the endlessness of the search and pining for the deceased. Through an autoethnographic recollection of memories and reembodiment of the past, this article provides a useful accompaniment to studies on bereaved adolescents and motherless daughters attempting to navigate living life without their lighthouse. 
Parallel Transitions: Mothering an Adolescent While Aging
Full text linkMothering in the menopause transition is a significant experience in the life course. Using autoethnography through a feminist standpoint framework, the author places her mothering experiences under the exploration of performing motherhood, intensive mothering, and mothering and aging. The author details how being an older mother going through the physical and emotional changes of perimenopause parallels the developmental changes of her adolescent son. Because dominant discourses define menopause as a sense of loss and motherhood as a youthful endeavour, the author aims to make sense of her role as an aging mother. Through empathy, the author finds a space to mother authentically. 
Not All Mothers Are Saints: Exploring Maternal Ambivalence in Indian Narratives
Full text linkMotherhood in contemporary urban India is a deeply emotional and socially charged experience, often idealized in public discourse but rarely explored through the lens of maternal ambivalence. This article examines the lived experiences of twenty participants, including biological, adoptive, and single mothers living in Kolkata, ranging in age from twenty-eight to forty-six years, who reveal the complex interplay between personal emotions and societal expectations. Using in-depth semistructured interviews conducted between 2020 and 2025, the article highlights how mothers grapple with feelings of guilt, exhaustion, and contradiction—emotions often silenced in mainstream narratives of mothering. Despite having supportive families and spouses, participants reported experiencing immense social pressure to conform to traditional ideals of the perfect mother. The research draws from psychoanalytic theories, feminist thought, and sociological frameworks to contextualize these findings. Theories by Dennis Winnicott and Julia Kristeva help illuminate the psychological toll of mothering, while feminist scholars such as Nancy Chodorow, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Kimberlé Crenshaw offer insight into the gendered emotional labour and intersecting identities shaping motherhood. The article also considers the influence of different regional Indian cinemas, as well as regional literature in reinforcing or challenging cultural myths of maternal perfection. The article argues that maternal ambivalence is not a weakness but a valid, even necessary, part of the mothering experience. It calls for a shift in public and academic discourse to acknowledge and honour these complex emotional realities, paving the way for a more empathetic and inclusive understanding of motherhood
Australian Sole Mothers and the Life Course: Risks, Needs, and Policy Opportunities
Full text linkDivorce is now a stage in the life course of many parents in Western countries. However, women continue to shoulder the burden of risk arising from parenthood and relationship breakdown, resulting in financial insecurity in the lives of sole mothers. While paid work has been heralded as a way by which social ills like poverty might be addressed, the truth is more complex for women parenting alone. This article draws on data from a study on perceptions of sole mother poverty and welfare, exploring online responses to Australian news stories published on the Gillard government’s sole parent welfare amendments. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s method for policy analysis, it analyzes the policy implications of sole mothers’ accounts of hardship, welfare, paid work, and caregiving during a period of intense welfare debate. These accounts highlight situations of insecure work and housing, difficulties accessing formal and informal childcare, the incompatibility of casual work and long employment hours with primary caregiving, the importance of government income support as a safety net, and the underpayment and nonpayment of child support. Accordingly, this article argues for more responsive and expansive policy measures that consider the employment, housing, welfare, and caregiving needs and circumstances of sole mothers, as well as greater policy recognition of caregiving. 
The Remote Professor: Making Academia Work for Working Mothers
Full text linkThis article explores the intersection of motherhood and academia, highlighting the struggles of working mothers in higher education and offering a model for incorporating remote work into academia. Drawing upon the literature on both academic motherhood and remote work, the author integrates the literature to argue that remote work can offer an innovative path for academic mothers seeking to manage all facets of their responsibilities. Commenting on the greedy institutions of both motherhood and academia, which demand total commitment, the author argues that academia, historically structured to favour men, must evolve to accommodate the realities of modern caregiving, particularly for women. Remote work can provide flexibility, autonomy, and geographic mobility for mothers as they manage the demands of caregiving while meeting the responsibilities of teaching, research, and service inherent to the faculty role.
However, creating effective remote positions must be done with care, as it is incumbent upon university chairs and administrators to address biases in determining who is offered remote roles. They must also work to mitigate challenges with remote work, such as feelings of isolation, lack of connection, and under-appreciation. To counteract these issues, academic chairs can support remote employees by maintaining regular communication, making them feel valued, and fostering a departmental culture that supports in-person and remote members equally. Rethinking work structures in academia through remote faculty positions presents an innovative way to ensure all faculty members, not just some, can thrive
Balancing Multiple Roles: The Experiences of Deaf Female Doctoral Students
Full text linkThis article presents an autoethnographic study featuring the narratives of four Deaf mothers who embarked on the challenging journey of pursuing doctoral degrees while fulfilling their responsibilities as parents, maintaining full-time employment, managing household duties, and carrying additional burdens associated with higher education. What initially began as conversations among these four mothers, sharing their personal experiences and struggles throughout their doctoral studies, evolved into the undertaking of this autoethnography. This study’s objective was to examine whether the absence of a support system, motivation, and family attitudes towards higher education had any discernible impact on their determination to attain a doctoral degree. Through a comprehensive analysis encompassing both formative and summative approaches, four common themes emerged: support, motivation, family attitude, and balancing roles. These themes align with existing ethnographic literature in this domain. Furthermore, the authors provide valuable insights and tools derived from these themes, facilitating the successful completion of a doctoral degree while fulfilling the multifaceted roles of being a mother
What Are We Trying to Build? Artist-Mothers in Academia on Creating Sustainable Careers
Full text linkThis article examines the unique challenges of motherhood in academia, advocating for distinguishing between fixed and malleable constraints while leveraging artistic thinking to develop proactive strategies for a more fulfilling academic life. From an artist’s perspective, it argues that many constraints, often perceived as rigid, can be creatively reinterpreted and reshaped, empowering academic mothers to design their professional and personal experiences.
Drawing on a literature review, personal vignettes, and insights from artistic practices, the article explores how an artistic mindset can support the creative problem-solving needed to navigate intersecting identities. Much of academic life is shown to be malleable, like clay, allowing for adaptation in areas such as flexible scheduling, workload management, and household partnerships. However, certain aspects, metaphorically described as “rocks in clay,” resist change, including the tenure clock, the availability of affordable childcare, and campus climate. Recognizing and understanding these fixed challenges enable informed decision-making and strategies to work around them.
The article concludes by summarizing key insights and advocating for an artistic approach to academic life that benefits not just mother academics but all scholars. Additionally, it offers institutional recommendations to enhance the adaptability of academic structures, contributing to the broader discourse on academic motherhood and providing actionable insights for supporting the success and wellbeing of mothers in academia across disciplines
Visual Essay: Perspectives on Motherhood, Labour, and Emerging Technologies
Full text linkThis visual essay traces the concept of “full-time mother” proposed by Gillian Ranson in the first volume of this journal. It connects the concept to contemporary notions of motherhood, concerning how emerging technologies mediate the home and the workplace as prime contexts for mothering. In this visual essay, we think through images and symbols of work, technologies, and spaces using the means of collage and scan art while analyzing and critiquing the contemporary entanglement of motherhood and work, especially as digital technologies (re)produce the mandate that mothers need to excel both at home and at work. Moreover, through technological designs and narratives, we explore how excelling in those two realms is a measure and a standard for so-called good motherhood. The technologies studied and visually depicted include breast pumps, smart screens, and motherhood-related apps. Our visual and analytical exploration leads us to develop the concept of “prototypical motherhood,” a term that we use to refer to the performative role of motherhood as mixed with the dynamics of productive work, which points towards progress, efficiency, and economic growth. In this sense, mothers must work in specific ways to meet certain ideals, promises, and standards. Prototypical motherhood operates as the dispositif, in Foucauldian terms, to frame what is possible for mothers and what mothers are capable of and able to control, so they remain within the confines of the overlapping relationship of care and productive work. We conclude with design provocations to reimagine technology and motherhood, and how this discussion could be extended to the social structures where we live today