Archives: News

Seminar 1: Citizenship, Migration and Mothering

Friday 22 November 2013

10.00am-5.00pm

Open University (London regional office)

1-11 Hawley Crescent

Camden Town

London NW1 8NP

Map and directions: http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/maps.aspx?contactid=1

This seminar will theorize and discuss the policy implications of migrant mothers’ citizenship

Keynote speaker:

Professor   Sarah Van Walsum, VU University, Amsterdam

Other speakers:

• Rosalind Bragg  (Maternity Alliance)
• Dr Tine Brouckaert  (Ghent University, Belgium)
• Professor  Isabel Dyck (Queen Mary University London)
• Dr Umut Erel (Open University)
• Donn Flynn ( Migrants Right Network)
• Dr Ronit Lentin (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
• Lutleja  Nuzi   (Sphresa Programme)
• Tracey Reynolds (London South Bank University)

Seminar convenors: Dr Umut Erel (CCIG, Open University) and Professor Tracey Reynolds (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU)

This event is free but spaces are limited to 50 delegates. To reserve a place email Kerry.Lawrence@open.ac.uk     by  12 November 2013

For further details of this networking event visit http://weekscentreforsocialandpolicyresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/summer-newsletter-20131.pdf

http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/migrant-mothers-caring-for-the-future

Different perspectives on Citizenship, Migration and Mothering in Migration Law

 Sarah Van Walsum

This talk will address the different values that have and are being attached to migrants as mothers in migration law in the Netherlands and at the EU level. It does this  by reviewing case law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against the background of the Dutch case. After discussing an essay by Wendy Brown on the role of the state in currently changing gender orders, the article ends by questioning to what degree the tensions, contradictions and confusion regarding the relationship between citizenship, migration and mothering, might open space for a feminist response to increasing state control over women’s lives.

Sarah van Walsum is Professor in Migration Law and Family Ties at the VU University, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her main fields of interest are: transnational family relations, family migration law, migrant domestic workers and women and migration law. Together with Thomas Spijkerboer she edited the volume: Women and Immigration Law. New variations on classical feminist themes, published by Routledge-Cavendish in 2007. Her most recent monograph is: The Family and the Nation. Dutch family migration policies in the context of changing family norms, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008.

Undocumented mothers on the national stage.

 Tine Brouckaert

Undocumented persons are juridical excluded from citizenship. However because of their embodiment that often differs the masculine white norm, they are also socially and culturally excluded from citizenship. Although, through their reproductive status as a mother their political citizenship is ambivalent and contested (hooks 1990; Kershaw 2010; 2011). This paper addresses their response to so-called “niches” (Nicholls 2013) in citizenship discourses and legal categories, setting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In their aim to obtain a legal residence permit, I consider here their “becoming mother” an active and political act of citizenship.

This paper draws from a longitudinal in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with ten undocumented migrant mothers. The case studies are composed of a heterogeneous group of women of color in terms of age, class, national and ethnic belongings, in order to primarily focus on the role of undocumented status, gender and identity as a mother rather than to focus upon national, cultural or ethnical belonging. This paper builds upon the post-migration routes of some of the key participants to this research. Responses of undocumented women towards the legal framework seemed to arise from their most intimate sphere and applied to the reproductive dimension of their embodiedness. Confronted by citizenship discourses, ensuring the communities coherence by excluding and including forms of kinship, the women engendered an embodied fictive maternal identity (Butler 1999: 417). It is in the imitation of this figure that enable them to become subjects. I here claim their action as a temporal social constructed identity that attest political citizenship potential.

 Dr Tine Brouckaert has a PhD in Comparative Sciences of Culture at the Ghent University and the University of Saint-Etienne. Her dissertation “Giving Birth to Citizenship” (original: Accoucher la citoyenneté. Expériences et témoignages de femmes sans-papiers à propos de leur travail maternel) addresses questions on mothering with an undocumented citizenship status. Her research interests are critical citizenship studies, mothering, anthropology of gender and diversity, postcolonial and feminist studies.

Migrant mothers, human capital and citizenship: hidden care

Isabel Dyck

In this paper I reflect upon the hidden contribution to a nation’s developing citizenry through the translation of different forms of capital in broadly conceived acts of care by migrant mothers. Focusing primarily on the home and, through its extension into the neighbourhood, I examine how sites of capital transformation are coded ‘domestic’ yet are integrally involved in a wider ‘place-making’. Drawing on qualitative data from a set of studies with migrant women from different sending countries and living in different neighbourhoods in a major Canadian city, the paper comments on how negotiation and translation of cultural and emotional capital in the course of quotidian life results in the transformation of cultural identities, bodies, and place identities as immigrants strive to ‘belong’. These transformations illustrate the intertwining of immigrant status and the local in ways that question the utility of the common orientation in immigration policy of restricting the notion of human capital with economic potential in labour markets and its inherent gendered assumptions. Further, the paper supports other work that notes the fragmented meaning of ‘citizenship’ according to scale, as city, nation-state and transnational identifications collide.

 Professor Isabel Dyck is a social and feminist geographer and a member of the Health, Place and Society research theme. She taught at the University of British Columbia prior to joining the School of Geography at Queen Mary in 2005. Her work has contributed to the development of health and feminist geography, theoretically and through methodological innovation. Her main current research interests concern the provision of long-term care in the home and various issues related to immigration and resettlement. Gender and generational differences in relation to immigration experiences provide a particular focus. Recent projects use the lens of therapeutic landscapes from health geography to examine immigrant women’s re-making of home and to investigate the continuities and transformations of health practices through processes of migration. This research has been conducted in Vancouver, Canada, and London. In addition to gaining insight into how place, culture and health practices interweave dynamically, this work shows the centrality of the materiality and meanings of ‘home’ in how health is defined and managed. A range of qualitative methods has been used in these studies, including film.

A migrant died: Abortion and the politics of motherhood in Ireland

Dr Ronit Lenin
The death in hospital of 17 weeks pregnant Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar in October 2012, rekindled Ireland’s long standing abortion debate. Locating her case in the politics of birth in Ireland, this paper situates Halappanavar’s story firstly within Ireland’s gendered birthing politics, where women are cast as m/others, and  secondly within the briefer history of casting migrant women’s birthing practices as threatening the integrity of Irish citizenship. The paper makes two claims. Firstly, I argue  that migrant m/others are the female version of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’, or homo sacer – femina sacra – she whose life can be taken by the sovereign racial state. Secondly, after Eithne Luibheid, I propose that the casting of migrant m/others as disrupting Irish national integrity originates from an unquestioned heteronormativity and white privilege, and that migrant m/others, in ‘childbearing against the state’, consolidate rather than disrupt  Irish nationhood.

Ronit Lentin is associate professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on race and gender, racism in Ireland, Israel/Palestine. Her books include Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (2002, with Robbie McVeigh), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002, with Nahla Abdo), After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (2006, with Robbie McVeigh), Race and State (2006/8, with Alana Lentin), Thinking Palestine (2008), Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012, with Elena Moreo).

Don Flynn has worked in the field of migration policy since the mid-1970s, when he started work as a caseworker at a London law centre.  Since then he has worked as policy officer for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, a national legal rights organisation. He currently leads the Migrants’ Rights Network, which works to improve networking between migrant and refugee community organisations and other civil society organisations working to support the rights of all migrants.  He is also involved in networking with migrants’ rights organisations across Europe, currently serving at the Chair of PICUM – the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants.He chairs the steering group of the UK Race & Europe Network (UKREN).. UKREN brings together groups concerned with racial equality in the UK with an interest in monitoring and influencing development in the rest of Europe.  He regularly writes on themes relating to the politics of immigration and blogs on the MRN website, (www.migrantsrights.org.uk). He tweets on @donflynnmrn.

Luljeta Nuzi is the founder of Shpresa Programme  an user led organization that works to promote the integration of the Albanian community  here in UK( mainly mothers and children). She believes on integration with dignity and not assimilation and as has chosen as vehicles to achieve this, the social entrepreneur and community organsing movements. Shpresa works in partnership with a range of organization especially mainstream school and specialized organization such as WTC and Solace to address specific issues such as mental health and domestic violence. Luljeta is a strong believer that everyone coming to this country  have skill to offer and should be encouraged and supported to overcome difficulties that they are facing at first , create a stimulating environment  for them   so they can play and active role in community and contribute  to society.

Rozsika Parker, author of Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence and The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, represented WPF/FPC on the BJP’s Board for many years. She remained a member of the Journal’s Editorial Advisory Panel until her death in 2010. She was well known for her commitment to creativity, in both art and clinical practice, and our new Essay Prize focuses on a critical engagement with this theme. The Journal is particularly interested in factors that support creativity in clinical or theoretical work, and those that may militate against it.

The Prize has two entry routes: a Student Path and a Post-Qualification Path. Authors should indicate under which route they wish to be considered.

Students or qualified clinicians are invited to submit original papers on adult or child psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, on either clinical or theoretical topics. The Student path is open to students on clinical trainings, on university courses in psychoanalytic studies, and on university courses where psychoanalysis is a significant component; the Post-Qualification path is open to clinical practitioners only.

In addition to the focus on creativity, the application of psychoanalytic theory to questions of gender, art, literature, film and music is also welcomed. Authors should consult the BJP’s submission guidelines (particularly in relation to confidentiality, where clinical material is concerned) and prepare their work with the Journal’s Aims and Scope statement in mind. Advice will be available should there be questions concerning confidentiality, or eligibility to submit work.

Submitted papers must not have been published elsewhere, or currently be under consideration for publication.  Manuscripts should be up to 6000 words in length including references, not including an Abstract of 200 words. They should be submitted through the ScholarOne website. For submission information please consult http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bjp

The covering letter should state that the submission is for consideration for the Rozsika Parker Prize, and indicate under which path (Student or Post-Qualification) the paper should be considered. Information about training status, training institution and/or date of qualification; or university course and current status should be included.

A panel of senior clinicians and academics will judge the papers, and the prize-winning papers will be published in the Journal. A cash prize will be awarded in each category, along with a one-year online subscription to the British Journal of Psychotherapy  or the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.  The winning papers will be presented at  a  BJP event, to be announced in due course.

Closing date: 15 December 2013

For any queries, please email Ann Scott, Editor-in-Chief, at  bjp@ann-scott.net

“The egg, the womb, the head and the moon” (http://www.eggwombheadmoon.com/) is an exciting, new, online, interdisciplinary, and collaborative arts project that will last for a duration of nine months (42 weeks)–a time frame that purposefully mirrors that of the duration of pregnancy. Now into its ninth week, the site contains moving and powerful art and texts by artists, performers, photographers, academics and poets exploring a diverse range of subjects about the maternal. The project and site is due to be exhibited and presented at the AHRC Motherhood in Post-1968 Women’s Writing: Cross Cultural and Interdisciplinary

Dialogues conference at the University of London’s Senate House in October.

We are currently building a Membership page that will include the names of all of our current members, their institutional affiliation, and links to their academic/professional websites. This is a great opportunity for members to showcase their own work and to interact with other members. If you would like to join MaMSIE, please have a look at the membership page.

MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics) is an online interdisciplinary research network based in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. MaMSIE endeavours to create a space for critical debates about the maternal, and explore the unique site it occupies at the potent intersection between scientific possibilities, psychosocial practices and cultural representations. In order to further this aim, MaMSIE launched a postgraduate student led blog, in January of this year. Following the success of our initial blog posts on issues from IVF and pregnancy testing to ‘sinful’ mothers in film and television; we are now looking for contributions from other young academics working on the maternal.

We are seeking contributions of between 500 and 1000 words on issues concerned with the maternal from those working across different knowledge and practice communities including feminism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, the social sciences, philosophy, visual and performance art and literature. We welcome a range of writing styles and formats, and are looking for blog entries that will stimulate lively scholarly debate. We encourage submissions from graduate students and hope to create a space where people can try out emerging ideas and respond to current issues surrounding the maternal, whether in current affairs, policy, the arts or academia.

The deadline to be considered for the next selection of blog posts is 1st July 2013. Submissions should be sent to Marianna Vargas De Freitas Cruz Leite ( mleite03@mail.bbk.ac.uk) and should include a short biography and contact information. If the piece is selected for entry on the blog, it will undergo some light copy editing and we will also request a photograph of the author to accompany the piece.

Any questions please contact Marianna Vargas de Freitas Cruz Leite at the above address.

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Women’s Studies International Forum: Choosing mothering? The Gendering of Agency

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide an international forum within which to pose and debate issues that arise in relation to agency and choice surrounding mothering.

In the current neo-liberal context in which ‘choice’ is offered to women as a panacea for differential access to power, the aim of this Special Issue is to examine the ways in which women position themselves and are positioned by others, in relation to motherhood. Manuscripts are invited that discuss ways in which women engage with choices ‘offered’ to them and how the status of ‘mother’ is implicated in these. Submissions may include discussions about the constitution of agency in relation to choices about issues such as entering (or not entering) motherhood, being a mother, practicing and performing motherhood in different arenas and accounting for different approaches to mothering.

We invite contributions from those working with a feminist perspective in a range of disciplines. We are interested in submissions that address ontological, epistemological and practical issues around agency and choice-making for women including, but not limited to, the following questions and topics:

• How is women’s agency in maternal choice-making constituted within and across different cultural, social and interpersonal contexts?
• How are understandings of (non)maternity implicated in the negotiation of agency for women?
• Is choice-making without consideration of maternal status attainable?
• What challenges do conceptualisations of mothering pose for theorisations of agency in designing and conducting feminist research?

As well as traditional formats, submission in non-conventional writing styles and as art or images are encouraged.

To be considered for this special issue, submissions must fit the requirements for submission of the journal: http://www.elsevier.com/journals/womens-studies-international-forum/0277-5395/guide-for-authors.

Please follow guidelines there to submit manuscripts for review by 30 November 2013.

Please contact the Guest Editors Nollaig Frost (n.frost@mdx.ac.uk), Rose Capdevila (rose.capdevila@open.ac.uk) and Sally Johnson (s.e.johnson2@bradford.ac.uk) with any queries.

WSIF – Call for submissions final

Maternal Aesthetics: The Surprise of the Real

Guest Curator: Andrea Liss, California State University, San Marcos

Maternal Aesthetics: the Surprise of the Real is a special issue of Studies in the Maternal, aiming to bring together a vibrant intermingling of work by visual artists, scholars of visual culture and feminist theory, poets, writers, activists and more, who are engaged in thinking about new conceptualizations of the maternal.

As guest curator of this special themed issue, I would like to bring forth the unexpected juxtapositions of images and texts that set maternal identities, subjectivities and inter-subjectivities in motion, where the previously displaced and devalued maternal is voiced from a mother’s perspective and configured anew. Maternal Aesthetics: the Surprise of the Real will therefore aim to elicit moments ranging from subtle awareness to the surprise of the real when feminist artists and writers became cognizent of themselves as mothers, when sense of self and sense of self with child(ren) brings about new subjectivities and inter-subjectivities.

The issue will include contributions that articulate such transformations: what sorts of ruptures, continuities, resistances, discomforts or other responses are experienced in domestic spaces, public workplaces and other cultural spheres by mothers and articulated as mothers (biological or otherwise). Maternal Aesthetics: the Surprise of the Real will create a forum to represent how feminist artists and writers understand, embrace, resist, live and perform the act of mothering in and throughout their lives. Reflections and analyses addressing such experiences of transformation between the mother and her adult child(ren), as well as intergenerational perspectives are also welcome.

Call for Papers

‘Reimagining Birth’ An International Research Symposium on the Visual Culture/Art/History/Design of Childbirth in the 21^st century

University College Dublin

2^nd-3^rd July 2013

Developed and hosted by UCD PhD Candidates Doreen Balabanoff and Martina Hynan

How has childbirth been portrayed/represented/imagined in the worlds of art and medicine? 

What do these images tell us about our cultural relationship with birth?

This interdisciplinary research symposium will provide an opportunity for contemporary critical debates into the visual culture of childbirth and consider how our cultural representations of birth influence our approaches to childbirth itself.

The event will draw on visual theorisations of women’s birthing bodies from the eighteenth century on; investigate visual readings of maternal identity in local and global cultures, and consider images and texts representing birth events and birth environments. This emerging research area focuses on perspectives from the lived experience of women and diverse practitioners, and seeks to bring together historical, contemporary and futuristic understandings of individual and societal portrayals and manifestations of birth experience and environment.  This interdisciplinary forum will consider how our cultural representations of the subject influence our approach to childbirth itself.

This will be a unique opportunity for researchers and practitioners to explore/discuss the visual and sensorial culture of birth, and to contribute to our re-imagining of this fundamental personal life experience for mother and child.  Central to the vision of this project is the ambition to build connections between interested parties, providing a forum for transcending current knowledge silos and contributing to innovative change in this important personal/cultural domain of human experience.

To this end, we call for papers, presentations and also welcome workshop proposals that focus on interaction among delegates.  Our invitation is open to visual cultural theorists, historians, feminists, midwives, medical practitioners, social scientists, writers, artists, designers, architects, etc.  We hope this project stimulates the sharing of papers that explore perceptions of birth experience, culture and environment – how birth has been seen in the past, how it has come to be seen contemporaneously through diverse perspectives and how the future of childbirth might be imagined/re-imagined, through visual forms of representation and expression.

While we welcome traditional academic papers, we also encourage creative methods of delivery that may include performance and visual arts approaches.

There will be two ‘panels’ initiated by the convenors, with the invited participants.  Each panel will focus the discussion of the day around one of two large ‘arenas’ of interest:

1)     Birth: Visual Image/Visual Culture – led by Martina Hynan

This panel will consider representations/perceptions of the lived experience of childbirth in visual culture from 18^th century onwards and contemplate the ways birth was/is portrayed in art historical, non-medical contexts, and the contribution that medical professionals have brought to an evolving visual culture of childbirth and the birthing body.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• representations of birth in art; image and body politics of childbirth;  birth and feminist art practice; visualizing birth in medicine;  birth as liminal experience;  censored/censoring images of birth;  visual readings of birth in Ireland;  portrayals of birth interventions;  maternal visions;  images of the Maternal;  imagining/re-imagining the Maternal Taboo;  symbolic/images of the reproductive cycle;  images of fertility and reproduction;  folk customs, cultural rituals of fertility and reproduction locally and globally;  mythologies of the birthing body;  religious representations/discourse of reproduction;  imagining gender and biomedicine of childbirth;  visual technologies of/for the birthing body; imagery of the “changing” body:  rebirth and metamorphosis;  obstetric museums – focus and design;  birth anatomy – anatomical representations of childbirth.

2)     Birth: Visual/Sensory Environment – led by Doreen Balabanoff

This panel will address the potency of the visual and sensory environment and its affect/effect on the birth process, considering phenomenological aspects of physical and ephemeral architecture as mind/body experience in space/form/time.  The evolution of the birth environment: home to hospital to  birth centre; ‘labour  ward’ to ‘private labour and delivery room’; ‘natural’ to ‘industrial’; ‘homely’, ‘fashion-conscious’ or ‘five star’. The focus is not limited to the labour room – consideration of birth environment includes a more comprehensive set of spaces.

Presentation, papers and proposals might include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• representations/visualisations of imagined or actual historic, contemporary or future birth spaces/places/architectures;  planning, systems and political stances that impact birthspace design;  philosophical/theoretical approaches to re-imagining future birth environments;  focus on the newborn and psychophysiological experience;  natural and artificial lighting: physical and psychophysiological implications for birth processes and experiences of mother and newborns;  environmental colour relevant to birth spaces;  visual, olfactory, auditory and other sensory/multi-sensory or cross-modal factors relevant to birth experience;  materiality and tactility studies on birth experience/environment; design and use of furnishings for birth environment;  temporality of birth experience and spatial attributes;  narratives from participants, whether mothers, partners, midwives, nurses, doctors related to environment;  poetic evocations – literary writings about birth which evoke images of birth environment;  feminist approaches to architecture as space/form/time relevant to birthspace;  medical and social sciences studies of birth experience/space;  consciousness studies related to birth and labour;  accommodating diversity in multicutural settings;  respecting indigenous and local cultures and ‘genius loci’;  biophilic and salutogenic approaches to birthplace architecture

Submissions for 1) panel:  Birth: Visual Image/Visual Culture should be sent to Martina Hynan atmartinahynan@gmail.com  Please use Reimagining Birth as the subject line.

Submissions for 2) panel:  Birth: Visual/Sensory Environment should be sent to Doreen Balabanoff at doreen.balabanoff@gmail.com.  Please use Reimagining Birth as the subject line

• Abstracts should be 500 words or less, together with a short bio of 250 words or less.  Include a cover sheet with name, institution, department, and contact information.  Document should be submitted as a PDF.
• Deadline:  Abstracts and bios should reach us on or before 5pm, Friday 12^th April, 2013.  Notification Friday 10^th May 2013.