MoM Conference 2023

REPRODUCTIVE LANDSCAPES- Undoing m/otherhood; who has the right to talk about motherhood, who claims that status, and how do we create words, art, and scholarship moving forward?

MoM Conference 2023 – SCHEDULE –FINAL PAPERS & TITLES; MARCH 24-26

FRIDAY: ZOOMTHANKS Creative Grape!3100 3rd Ave N, St. Petersburg, FL 33713
9 AMMartha Joy RoseZOOM: Intro
9:30 AMBatya WeinbaumZOOM: Contextualizing Motherhood: Notes on the Power We Might Not Want to Give Away, Drawn from the Second Wave
10 AMJustyna WierzchowskaZOOM: A Mother-Artist’s Work: Reclaiming Black Motherhood in Renée Cox’s Yo Mama and American Family Photographic Series
10:30 AMEmily SmithZOOM: Sanctifying Pregnancy: Catholics and Natural Childbirth in the 1950s
11 AMDanielle Bell ProcopeZOOM: The Collapsing Spheres of Black Working Motherhood at the turn of Twentieth Century 
11:30 AMEmma OsléZOOM: Madres, Madonnas, and Malinches: Maternal Imagery in the Latin American Diaspora
12 PMNatalia Laverde OsunaZOOM: Who is allowed to be a mother in today’s western society?
12:30 Break  
1:30 PMRachel VanEvery presenting for Amy WrightZOOM: The Indigenous Mother’s Healthcare Narrative: Her Story, Her Art, Her Way
2 PMLiz KukuraZOOM: Embracing Maternal Ambivalence
2:30 PMKatherine NolanZOOM: Performing Miscarriage: Material Experiences of the Loss of Motherhood
3 PMAngela Beallor & Elizabeth PressZOOM: Reproducing Queers: Queer Knowledge (Re)Productions and Learning with Our Gender Creative Child
3:30 PMMary Nickel  ZOOM: Who is She? Inclusivity, Language, and Pregnancy
4:00 PMKate GoldingZOOM: Monumental care: Lockdowns, caregiving and collaborative creative practice
4:30 PMBailey HigginsZOOM: Without A Village: Motherhood, Child Care, and COVID-19
5-6 PMOpen DiscussionZOOM: Discussion on the topics presented
SATURDAYCREATIVE GRAPEDINNER AFTER
9 AMTiffany Valencia, Christina Enodien Supervisor Michael KrampZOOM: The Mothers of Sierra Leone documentary film
9:30 AMAliesha ClarkIN PERSON: A Megaphone for Black Mothers
10:00 AMLyani PowersIN PERSON: Traditional / Indigenous practices and ritual as postpartum care as an act of Remembering and Revolution
10:30 AMJill M. WoodIN PERSON: Birth Justice: Pregnancy Self-Help Literature as Disembodiment
11 AMAmanda ApgarIN PERSON: A new Mother Blame
11:30 AMLaci Mattison & Jordan Von Cannon  IN PERSON: Everybody’s Mother: Post-Pandemic Parenting and the Second Shift in Academia
12 BREAK  
1 PMSally ButcherIN PERSON: (In) Fertile Embodiment: Revealing the Invisibility of Infertility between the Medical and the Maternal through a Feminist Art Practice
1:30 PMRachael GradZOOM: Motherhood Moments: creating new aesthetic space
2 PMValerie SmithIN PERSON: “We Were Never Meant to Survive”: An Autoethnography of Resilience and Black Motherhood
2:30 PMRebecca Marcelina GimenoIN PERSON: Mothering a Ghost: Bone Baby 
3 PMJWellsIN PERSON: “I don’t want someone dirty holding my baby”: Analyzing Misogynoir in Babies Behind Bars.
3:30 PMMichelle Hughes MillerIN PERSON: Woman, mother, Person- Dobbs and the Justices’ Understandings of Pregnant People
4 PMBrittany DeNucciIN PERSON: Emotional Support and Mindfulness in Motherhood
4:30 – 6 PMDiscussion & DinnerCreative Grape
SUNDAYZoom and Onsite
10 AM Jennifer MaherZOOM: Rescuing Maternity: Masculinity, The Child, and Queer Futurity in 9-1-1
11 AMEstelle PhilipsZOOM: Motherhoodlum
11:30 AMLaura BissellZOOM: Performing Matrescence: Becoming and Unbecoming
12 PMSarah SudhoffZOOM: Mother Chew
12:30 PMMateusz KucabZOOM: Duty – Fulfillment – Stigma. Motherhood in the Dramas of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska
1:00 PMCaron Greenblatt  ZOOM: Art Presentation
1:30 PMOpen Reading/ Discussion RoundtableZOOM: Portions of a text, poetry, spoken word
FYI – Additional SharingKiesa KayLINK to Losing our Birth Centers – Let’s not leave rural woman out of academic conversations: article

St. Petersburg, Florida & Online / March 24-26, 2023 / Museum of Motherhood

Calling all scholars, sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, women’s, sexuality, and gender professors, masculinity studies experts, birth-workers, doctors, motherhood and fatherhood researchers, artists, students, and performers: This conference call is for papers, performances, conversations, and art, focused on new gender identities and discourse. Included in this call is an invitation to explore political policy positions relative to Roe vs. Wade, psychological manifestations of maternal neonaticide, infanticide, and filicide, well as the naming and rewriting of works, art, and scholarship around mothers, mothering, and motherhood. How do we approach this? Who gets to say what? How do we make visible these topics in mainstream articulations? How are those with (dis)abilities and other marginalized positionalities heard and made visible? In what ways does inclusivity threaten the status quo? How can we complicate binary viewpoints and assertions situated in a fear-based cultural reality? We rely on previous scholarship, now framed within the context of changing times. What now will we make of ourselves together and separately? We are, after all, the future!

We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain and the medicalized environment within which these debates are often situated as we embrace and analyze meaning-making, in the area of maternal health, identity, experience, and well-being. What is good for whom and how does that impact everyone else?

We intend the conference to serve as a site of resistance as we deconstruct, reframe, and affirm the complex landscape of embodied mother-work, pregnancy, birth, identity, care-work, and the ongoing labor and experience of those within family systems everywhere. We recognize the scale, variance, and duration of these passionate debates and hope to support and empower those who need support the most.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Intersectional identities

Normative constructions of gender in motherwork, pregnancy and birthing

Biomedical and cultural discourses of motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including issues related to marginalized identities, fertility treatment, gender identity, and intersex identities

Motherwork, pregnancy and birthing with (dis-)abilities, illness, and children with special needs

Child and maternal psychology interventions, alternative therapies, and results

Breastfeeding ambivalence, obstacles, and outcomes

Future wombs, including transplants, artificial constructions, cloning, and surrogacy

Art as healing and activism as visible resistance

Embodied resistance to socially constructed prescriptions and conventions about motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including as they are contextualized within marginalized positionalities

CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in 2023. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making art, working in therapudic, medical, university, and birth settings, as well as auto-ethnograpic perspectives by mothers, family members & students.

JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the 2023 conference should consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to Mother Studies published annually. Works may also be submitted for the conference only.

FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: Abstracts must include a title and bio. Abstracts must be submitted by Nov 30 (midnight). Notifications sent Dec. 15 and early bird registration begins $165. Regular Registration starts Jan 15th $180 and closes Feb 15th. Full submissions for the conference are due March 1st, (after acceptance to the conference). Full submissions for the Journal are due by May 30th (midnight). These include other submission types (e.g. performance, media, music). Go to https://jourms.org/submit/


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