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: ZOOM | THANKS Creative Grape! | 3100 3rd Ave N, St. Petersburg, FL 33713 |
9 AM | Martha Joy Rose | ZOOM: Intro |
9:30 AM | Batya Weinbaum | ZOOM: Contextualizing Motherhood: Notes on the Power We Might Not Want to Give Away, Drawn from the Second Wave |
10 AM | Justyna Wierzchowska | ZOOM: A Mother-Artist’s Work: Reclaiming Black Motherhood in Renée Cox’s Yo Mama and American Family Photographic Series |
10:30 AM | Emily Smith | ZOOM: Sanctifying Pregnancy: Catholics and Natural Childbirth in the 1950s |
11 AM | Danielle Bell Procope | ZOOM: The Collapsing Spheres of Black Working Motherhood at the turn of Twentieth Century |
11:30 AM | Emma Oslé | ZOOM: Madres, Madonnas, and Malinches: Maternal Imagery in the Latin American Diaspora |
12 PM | Natalia Laverde Osuna | ZOOM: Who is allowed to be a mother in today’s western society? |
12:30 Break | ||
1:30 PM | Rachel VanEvery presenting for Amy Wright | ZOOM: The Indigenous Mother’s Healthcare Narrative: Her Story, Her Art, Her Way |
2 PM | Liz Kukura | ZOOM: Embracing Maternal Ambivalence |
2:30 PM | Katherine Nolan | ZOOM: Performing Miscarriage: Material Experiences of the Loss of Motherhood |
3 PM | Angela Beallor & Elizabeth Press | ZOOM: Reproducing Queers: Queer Knowledge (Re)Productions and Learning with Our Gender Creative Child |
3:30 PM | Mary Nickel | ZOOM: Who is She? Inclusivity, Language, and Pregnancy |
4:00 PM | Kate Golding | ZOOM: Monumental care: Lockdowns, caregiving and collaborative creative practice |
4:30 PM | Bailey Higgins | ZOOM: Without A Village: Motherhood, Child Care, and COVID-19 |
5-6 PM | Open Discussion | ZOOM: Discussion on the topics presented |
SATURDAY | CREATIVE GRAPE | DINNER AFTER |
9 AM | Tiffany Valencia, Christina Enodien Supervisor Michael Kramp | ZOOM: The Mothers of Sierra Leone documentary film |
9:30 AM | Aliesha Clark | IN PERSON: A Megaphone for Black Mothers |
10:00 AM | Lyani Powers | IN PERSON: Traditional / Indigenous practices and ritual as postpartum care as an act of Remembering and Revolution |
10:30 AM | Jill M. Wood | IN PERSON: Birth Justice: Pregnancy Self-Help Literature as Disembodiment |
11 AM | Amanda Apgar | IN PERSON: A new Mother Blame |
11:30 AM | Laci Mattison & Jordan Von Cannon | IN PERSON: Everybody’s Mother: Post-Pandemic Parenting and the Second Shift in Academia |
12 BREAK | ||
1 PM | Sally Butcher | IN PERSON: (In) Fertile Embodiment: Revealing the Invisibility of Infertility between the Medical and the Maternal through a Feminist Art Practice |
1:30 PM | Rachael Grad | ZOOM: Motherhood Moments: creating new aesthetic space |
2 PM | Valerie Smith | IN PERSON: “We Were Never Meant to Survive”: An Autoethnography of Resilience and Black Motherhood |
2:30 PM | Rebecca Marcelina Gimeno | IN PERSON: Mothering a Ghost: Bone Baby |
3 PM | JWells | IN PERSON: “I don’t want someone dirty holding my baby”: Analyzing Misogynoir in Babies Behind Bars. |
3:30 PM | Michelle Hughes Miller | IN PERSON: Woman, mother, Person- Dobbs and the Justices’ Understandings of Pregnant People |
4 PM | Brittany DeNucci | IN PERSON: Emotional Support and Mindfulness in Motherhood |
4:30 – 6 PM | Discussion & Dinner | Creative Grape |
SUNDAY | Zoom and Onsite | |
10 AM | Jennifer Maher | ZOOM: Rescuing Maternity: Masculinity, The Child, and Queer Futurity in 9-1-1 |
11 AM | Estelle Philips | ZOOM: Motherhoodlum |
11:30 AM | Laura Bissell | ZOOM: Performing Matrescence: Becoming and Unbecoming |
12 PM | Sarah Sudhoff | ZOOM: Mother Chew |
12:30 PM | Mateusz Kucab | ZOOM: Duty – Fulfillment – Stigma. Motherhood in the Dramas of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska |
1:00 PM | Caron Greenblatt | ZOOM: Art Presentation |
1:30 PM | Open Reading/ Discussion Roundtable | ZOOM: Portions of a text, poetry, spoken word |
FYI – Additional Sharing | Kiesa Kay | LINK 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/