Archives: News

The baby grows have all been washed, the front door step has been scrubbed clean the crib is made up and the baby is fully engaged and ready to be born. Our due date is Friday 2nd May, so please join us at The David Wright Gallery, Artsmill,Hebden Bridge from 6-9pm for the opening of The Egg The Womb The Head & The Moon exhibition and the birth of the project. We will be wetting the babies head and jumping for joy in celebration of this 42 week long on-line collaboration about art and the maternal. As well as amazing art work to enjoy there will be a poetry reading by Char March a performance by the Mo Brown and a screening of Tyven by Adele Myers.

The exhibition contains personal and powerful work exploring a diverse range of subjects about maternal experience including installation, drawing, print, sculpture, video, photography, sound, performance, poetry and text.

Exhibiting Artists include Adele Myers, Bird Jones and Heald, Char March, Eti Wade, Frances Earnshaw, Helen Sargeant, Janet Griffiths, Kaye Heyes, Lena Simic, Mo Brown, Paula Chambers, Paula McCloskey, Rebecca Lupton, Rachele Howard, Sally Barker, Tabitha Moses, Teresa Wilson, Tracey Kershaw.

The project website will also be shown as part of the exhibition and includes posts by Amy Dignam, Christina MacRae, Ellen Storm, Francesca Keayes, Jasmine Gauthier, Jodie Hawkes, Juliet Guiness, Kristen Fredricksson, Lizzie Philps, Marina Cavazza & Egle Kackute, Rachel Fallon, Rebecca Baillie and Rosemary Betterton.

The exhibition continues until 25th May and is open Wed-Sunday 11am-4pm. There are also associated talks, screenings, workshops and events see the events section on the website for further information.

Copyright © 2014 The egg the womb the head and the moon, All rights reserved.

Studies in the Maternal Open Issue
Deadline: 1.7.2014
Publication Date: Autumn 2014

Studies in the Maternal invites submissions from academic researchers, activists, clinicians and artists who work on any topic relating to the maternal. We welcome contributions in feminism, psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, sociology, performance, philosophy, film studies and creative writing.
Alongside written submissions of short critical position pieces up to 3000 words (these may be position statements or preliminary writing that you wish to develop at a later stage), or longer articles up to 8000 words (essays, articles, and interviews up to 4000-5000 words or extended pieces up to 8000 words) we encourage those working in creative and non-written mediums, including visual and audio formats, to submit work on this theme. As this is an online journal, we particularly encourage use of hypertext links and images in submissions.

Please send enquires or submissions to: mamsie@sps.bbk.ac.uk
For submission guidelines see: http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/submission_guidelines.ht

Participate in the social media debate during and following the screening of artist Sheona Beaumont’s birth on One Born Every Minute and take part in the creation of her new artwork for forthcoming Birth Rites Collection art exhibition.

Visual artist Sheona Beaumont became a mum for the second time in September 2013, and was filmed at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, for Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute. As part of the Birth Online: Birth Offline project, she will be making new photographic work about her experience, and about the place for a spiritual expression of birth in such a public domain. Central to the process of making this work will be the response on social media during and after the episode in which she and her husband, a curate in the Church of England, feature on the 10th of March 2014. As an interactive live event, watched by millions, this documented conversation will form an integral part of the lenticular prints she intends to produce.

Beaumont’s perspective of faith brings a deeper reflection to birth and motherhood, which, far from being incompatible with the hospital environment or watching cameras, finds a place for praying the Bible, collective involvement, and even the virtual equivalent of a rite such as ‘The Churching of Women’, once well-known in the Anglican tradition. If ceremonies around birth have largely been lost in our medicalised Western culture today, it is nevertheless true that it remains a profoundly transforming moment for women where the extraordinarily miraculous meets the visceral intensity of bodily labour. To the extent that One Born Every Minute celebrates that moment as part of the story and background of the individuals, producers focussed on the importance of the Christian faith Beaumont shares with her husband, alongside and within the medical and relational approaches of the programme. Editing (One Born Every Minute) remained the full responsibility of Dragonfly Film & TV Productions.

Blogs

www.shospace.co.uk/blog

http://birthonlinebirthoffline.tumblr.com/

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/groups/20887033779/?ref=ts&fref=ts

Twitter

#OneBorn

#Birth_rites

 Sheona Beaumont completed her Masters in Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham (2004). She has had numerous successful exhibitions with her digitally-created photographic work on subjects relating to the Christian faith and the contexts for visual expression of theological ideas and practice, from monastic faith on Dartmoor to the abolition of the slave trade – see www.shospace.co.uk. Currently on maternity leave, Beaumont is studying for a PhD at the University of Gloucestershire,

where she is a Bible Society sponsored candidate at the Centre for the Bible and Spirituality, exploring visual representations of biblical imagery in photography and photo-based media. As well as publishing articles and reviews regularly, a second edition of her book ‘Bristol Through the Lens’ was published with Tangent Press in 2011. She is a regional associate for Art & Christianity Enquiry in the South West, being based in Bristol.

Birth Online: Birth Offline is a cross-cultural participatory arts project exploring varying communities perspectives on the idea of public birth. The exhibition will feature the work of ten artists including; Sheona Beaumont, Hermione Wiltshire, Helen Knowles, Claire Lawrie, Dylan Minor, Stelios Manganis, Rose Gibbs, Eti Wade, Anna MacDonald and Madeline Naranjo.

Over the past ten years childbirth has become increasingly visible via television, print and online media. Women’s need to document and publish their own birth on online platforms has exploded, to the extent that some YouTube birth videos achieve the same volume of hits as many popular music videos. Equally, TV programs like One Born Every Minute are contributing to the growing visual representation of childbirth in mainstream culture. What does the new ‘graphic visibility’ of birth in the digital age mean for our society? How do diverse audiences react to the different mediums used to represent birth ie. sculpture, drawing, painting and now photography, film and online platforms?

Birth Online: Birth Offline is curated by Helen Knowles, Birth Rites curator and Samantha Lippett, Birth Rites curatorial intern. The project has received funding from Arts Council England and The Association of Art Historians.

Blogging and Research

Knowles carried out an artist residency over the summer of 2013 at Santa Fe Arts Institute in New Mexico and visited Native American women and midwives from the pueblos in and around Santa Fe. On returning to the UK seminars, meetings and workshops were held with British men and women in Salford University; Castlefield Gallery; Cambridge University, Art in the Pub – Association of Art Historians and UCLAN. These meetings have enabled the team to garner thoughts on the growing visual representation of childbirth in mainstream culture, through digital media and social networking. After blogging these meetings, uploading recordings and images of this research they are now bringing together a large-scale exhibition of ten artists’ contemporary responses to this new phenomenon of birth in the digital age. The venue for the show is to be confirmed but possible venues include The Museum of Childhood, London and Brighton University Art Gallery.

Birth Rites Collection is on permanent public display in the Midwifery Directorate, University of Salford and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London. It is the only collectionin the world dedicated to the theme of childbirth and  comprises of painting, print, wallpapers, sculpture, artist books, new media, installation work and drawing by international artists including Judy Chicago. More information can be found at http://www.birthritescollection.org.uk

Edited by Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela

Proposals and Final Essays should be submitted by 30th April 2014 to:
Roberta Garrett r.garrett@uel.ac.uk
Tracey Jensen t.jensen@uel.ac.uk
Angela Voela a.voela@uel.ac.uk

Across social, cultural and political theory, neoliberalism is frequently associated with the triumph of individualism over traditional social bonds and relationships, the extension of economic imperatives into personal and intimate realms, and the supplanting of co-operation and mutualism with virulent competition, contractualisation and the rules and norms of the market.  The ‘neoliberal subject’ – self-governing, enterprising, calculating – that is produced within and disciplined by neoliberal discourse is often presumed to be precarious, weightless and fluid: unencumbered by institutional forms of alliance and filiation.  Yet, despite being endlessly reinvented as ‘in decline’ and in crisis across public debate and policymaking, the family remains at the aperture of psychocultural and psychosocial interest and fascination. Popular fictional and representational texts, which invest powerfully in traditional notions of the family as the bedrock of human relationships and society, have proliferated under neoliberalism.  But what is the relationship between families and neoliberalism?  How has neoliberalism changed that ways that we think about and represent the family?  How are ideas of solidarity, intimacy, legacy and the cultural politics of gender, generation and belonging transformed in this neoliberal moment?  And how do affective and intimate forms of belonging and struggle in turn transform the attributes, demands and politics of neoliberalism? Does the family assume such a prominent role in contemporary popular culture because it provides the only source of support and solace in the brutal environment created by neoliberal economic policies?  Or does it function to reinforce, reproduce and naturalise neoliberal values and attitudes?   Does the family serve to ‘naturalise’ retreat from public life and collective politics, and the pursuit of personal satisfactions and private legacy?  Can the family be a source of social critique under neoliberalism?  How do popular cultural texts reshape, resist or reinforce neoliberal conceptions of the traditional family? How can we disentangle ‘individuality’ and ‘family’ from the grip of neoliberalism and redefine their content, relevance or significance? How do popular cultural texts reshape, resist or reinforce neoliberal conceptions of the traditional family?

We have only just started to scratch the surface of these debates.  There is a gap between the social sciences, cultural theory and psychosocial studies in which these questions can be productively explored.  This volume seeks articles which speak across these disciplines, which address and examine how neoliberalism concerns the manipulation of the family at a bio-political level, how the emotional investments in neoliberalism manifest in the family, and how cultural (and often contradictory) resistances to neoliberalism/neoliberal familialism might have wider purchase.  The volume invites work which analyses sociocultural and political discourses and popular cultural texts and from different theoretical perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed on the literary and cinematic and representational devices employed around neoliberalism. Submissions from outside Anglo-Saxon Europe are encouraged. Theoretically informed contributions are being encouraged.
Possible topics may include:

•       Moral panics and the sexualisation of young women;
•       Cultural representations of gay parenting;
•       ‘Helicopter’ parents and the culture of intensive parenting;
•       Family and reinvention/recombinatory genres;
•       Crime fiction and the child victim;
•       Governmentality, affirmation and resistance;
•       Intimate markets and contractualisation;
•       Masculinity, femininity and childhood;
•       Alternative families in neoliberalism;
•       Textual negotiation of neoliberal values;
•       Imaginary geographies of the neoliberal family
•       Archetypical families and religion
•       Emotional economies of neoliberalism: parasitic, beastly, lumpen, abject families
•       Therapeutic discourses, self-help and intimate neoliberalism
350-500 word chapter proposals are due by 30th April 2014.
Proposals should be for original works not previously published (including in conference proceedings) and that are not currently under consideration for another edited collection or journal. If the essay is accepted for the collection, a full draft (5000-7000 words) will be required by November 30th 2014. Editors are happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.

Proposals and Final Essays should be submitted to:
Roberta Garrett r.garrett@uel.ac.uk
Tracey Jensen t.jensen@uel.ac.uk
Angela Voela a.voela@uel.ac.uk

Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University

Thursday 18^th and Friday 19th September 2014

Confirmed keynote speakers

Professor Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California

Professor Eithne Luibheid, University of Arizona, U.S

Professor Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, London

Professor Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University

Call for papers

This international multidisciplinary conference engages with perspectives from cultural studies, cultural geography, sociology, migration studies, and the creative arts to explore how migrant mothers realise and problematise their role in bringing up future citizens in contemporary societies, which are increasingly characterised ethnic, racial, religious, cultural and social diverse.  It will ask important questions about the processes that shape migrant mothers’ cultural and caring work in enabling their children to occupy a place as future citizens. It also interrogates how immigration and integration policies produce particular obstacles and limitations for migrant families and children. In considering migrant women’s caring, cultural and social practices as interventions into citizenship the conference aims to find out what we can learn by understanding transnational social and cultural resources of care, and also the inter-relationship between motherhood and nationhood.

We welcome proposals for papers, workshops and panels from academics, practitioners and policymakers. We encourage papers including, but not limited to the following issues:

• Mothering and citizenship practices at local, national and transnational levels
• Migrant mothers’ care and cultural work in bringing up future citizens
• Parenting, citizenship and the politics of difference
• Immigration and integration policies’ effects on migrant families
• Effects of hetero-normativity and homo-nationalist governmentality on migrant mothers, children and families
• Racialised, ethnicised and classed constructions of motherhood and nationhood,
• Arts-based practices, participatory and creative methods exploring and  generating new knowledge on migrant mothers’ and families’ citizenship
• Role of NGOs, Third Sector  and public sector agencies in negotiating integration, belonging participation

Please send your 300 word abstracts, panel or workshop proposals with a brief bio. and contact details to Kerry.Lawrence@open.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 1 April 2014. Limited Bursaries are available for postgraduate and early career researchers and academics based in resource-poor countries. Please email umut.erel@open.ac.uk to apply for a bursary by 30 April 2014.

We are delighted to announce that the 10th issue of Studies in the
 Maternal is now out. You can access it at http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk.

Many thanks to everyone involved in putting this issue together.

The next issue (May 2014) will be a special one on Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics edited by Harriet Cooper, Sophie Jones (PhD candidates, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London) and Fran Bigman (PhD candidate, Faculty of English,  University of Cambridge).

Please continue to send us work and post responses on Facebook, Twitter and the blog.

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year!