The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University will co-host a one-day symposium at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute on Thursday, April 08, 2010 on “Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother: Theory and Practice.”

ARM and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University are now seeking submissions for the symposium. The symposium will explore academic mothers’ experiences from both narrative and theory. While previous panel discussions and collections such as PhD Momma and Parenting and Professing examined being a mother academic from narrative or “lived experience” and others, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering issue on Mothers in the Academe, explored mother academics’ experiences from a theoretical perspective, this is the first symposium to do so incorporating both narrative and theory. The symposium will explore how both research and narrative can inform contemporary understandings of academic motherhood, particularly in regard to strategies of resistance and empowerment.

Paper proposals should strengthen the dialogue among academic motherhood, intellectual ideas, and personal narrative. The symposium will explore the topic of Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. We welcome submissions from scholars across disciplines.

The symposium will run from 9-5 and will include approximately 25 papers, with each panelist having 20 minutes to present their paper. To present at this symposium, you must be a member of ARM. The symposium will coincide with the NeMLA conference (April 07-11, 2010) at McGill University. The Institute is located at 2170 Bishop Street, Montreal, Quebec.

Topics can include (but are not limited to):
the maternal wall, “opting out”, mentoring and modeling, being a professor mother, work-life balance, negotiating or resisting the maternal wall, single mothers and academic work, graduate student mothering, being a mother on the tenure track, being a pregnant professor, maternity leave and academic mothering, poverty and academic mothering, juggling mothering and academic expectations, intersections between feminism and academic mothering, being an academic artist and mothering, race and academic mothering, academic job searches and mothering, teaching and mothering, sexuality and academic mothering, male organizing principles and academic mothering, the academic schedule and mothering, fertility and academic mothering, challenging assumptions about academic mothers, ethics and academic mothering, “having it all” as academic mothers, adoption and academic mothering, networking, strategies for surviving academic mothering, class and academic mothering, race and academic mother mentors, social reproduction and academic mothering, motherhood closet, being out as a mother, second/third shift in the home, academic culture and mothering, maternal pedagogy, myth of ideal worker/ideal mother, intensive mothering and academe, unboundedness of mother work and academic work, childcare, fathering, trailing spouses, academic couples, biological clock, university policies and mothering, timing and spacing of children, perceptions of mothers in academe, discrimination avoidance, discrimination against mothers in academe, motherhood penalty, “price of motherhood”, adjunct work, teaching and motherhood, benefits of motherhood on teaching and research.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Abstracts due by December 01, 2010.

Scholars interested in submitting proposals to this symposium are invited to submit proposals to D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein at lhallst@bu.edu
or Andrea O’Reily aoreilly@yorku.ca

The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

Abstract Deadline: September 30, 2009

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother: Theory and Narrative

While previous books and panels have examined being a mother academic from narrative or “lived experience” and others explored mother academics’ experiences from a theoretical perspective, this panel will incorporate both narrative and theory. The panel will explore how both research and narrative can inform contemporary understandings of academic motherhood and will strengthen the dialogue among academic motherhood, intellectual ideas, and narrative. Please submit 200-300 word abstracts to D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein at lhallst@bu.edu.

Literary Motherhood in the New World

This panel seeks submissions of 200-400 words which focus on the relationship between a mother and her children and/or the social role of the mother in the New World in both racialized and non-racialized contexts. Submissions from literary works which draw from the New World-North and South American mainland as well as the Caribbean-are welcomed as are works which draw from both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Please send submissions to Kate Caccavaio at caccavai@msu.edu.

The Adoption Memoir

As the forming of families through trans-national adoption has radically increased over the past decade, a new genre of memoir writing has emerged. This panel will examine the Adoption Memoir as a cultural expression of the need to interrogate this new form of family making, and its impact on the family members and society. Papers can be on single or selections of memoirs, from all viewpoints (adoptive parent, adoptee and birthparents). Literary, socio-political, psychoanalytic, feminist and global-economic approaches welcome. Lindsay Davies at lindsay.davies@nyu.edu

For more information about the conference, including a full list of participants, please visit the website.

Mothers Creating/Writing Lives: Motherhood Memoirs

As memoir continues to expand in popularity, motherhood memoir has become an increasingly prominent and lucrative subgenre for contemporary authors. As Michelle Herman points out in The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood, if forced to choose between her daughter and her writing, she would choose her daughter, but this would be a gut-wrenching decision. Instead, her writing life is woven into her mothering life, and she finds that she can write in conditions she would have previously thought impossible. It is clear that writers who are also mothers must write their stories. How do they do it, why are so many readers interested in what they have to say, and what can we learn from them? Women have been writing about motherhood as long as they have been writing, but the contemporary shift to tell-all memoirs has changed the rules of writing about mothering, and perhaps, of mothering itself.

We are seeking proposals for a collection that will interrogate and critique the motherhood memoir. In addition to a new collection entitled Mama Ph.D.: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, there are several very recent motherhood memoirs that demand critical attention, works such as: Adrienne Martini’s, Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood; Susan Johnson’s, A Better Woman; Ayun Halliday’s, The Big Rumpus; and Anne Roiphe’s, Living Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood. What are these and other writing mothers saying about the experience of mothering today? What, if any, universals are present in motherhood memoirs? What societal critiques and suggestions provide the bedrock for potential revolutionary parenting practices? This collection will strive to bridge the distance between writing mothers who are critics and writing mothers who are authors by privileging academic work that seeks to discuss and contextualize motherhood memoirs beside authors’ own experiences of mothering, academic life, and writing. Autotheoretical works are encouraged, as are works that seek to meaningfully compare contemporary motherhood memoirs with those written in other eras, or works which thematically explore a grouping of memoirs. For example, one might discuss the role of fathers, special needs children, mothering and mental illness, etc. in several volumes, particularly if these topics inform the author’s own experiences. Other possible topics include the range of issues related to choice (the choice of whether/when/how to mother, etc.), mothering and socioeconomic class, mothering and race, mothering at different ages, mothering and prose/poetic form, mothering and sexuality, and other topical themes.

Please send one to two page proposals and a curriculum vitae to Justine Dymond, jdymond AT spfldcol DOT edu , and Nicole Willey, nwilley AT kent DOT edu, by April 15, 2009.

“The survey [of more than 8300 graduate students] found that 84 percent of women and 74 percent of men are somewhat or very concerned about the family friendliness of their future employers. But only 46 percent of men and only 29 percent of women imagine jobs in research universities to be somewhat or very family friendly.”

Read more about the study at Inside Higher Ed.

The 2008 book, Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life, offers a diverse set of perspectives on the challenges and rewards of combining parenthood with an
academic career. This proposal seeks to continue that conversation, particularly focusing on the experience of parenting as Women’s Studies (and WS-related) faculty and graduate
students. Despite the popular perception of academia as a flexible career that easily accommodates parenthood (“You only teach 12 hours a week? And you have summers off?”), the demands of publishing, teaching, dissertation writing, attending conferences, going on the job market, and activism make navigating the work/family divide difficult.

The session will consist of a discussion among panelists, as well as audience members, about various aspects of academic parenting. Topics to be covered may include, but are not limited to:

-planning: when is the best time?

-pregnancy

-working with reproductive technologies

-affording children on grad school stipends and temporary
position pay

-issues with medical benefits

-feminist parenting

-struggles with conception

-attitudes toward parenting in departments and universities

-birthing

-parenting while on the tenure track

-parenting after tenure

-parenting during graduate school

-parenting as an undergraduate

-parenting on the job market

-parenting as a non-traditional student

-adoption

-remaining childfree

-single parenting

-issues in co-parenting

Embedded within our discussion will be an attentiveness to the
ways in which all of these issues are impacted by gender, race, class,
sexuality, age, and ability. Ideally,
participants will include an assortment of individuals who can speak to the
challenges and rewards of parenting at different levels of an academic
career.

Please send a short paragraph describing your proposed
contribution to the roundtable to brown.2997ATosuDOTedu
by February 1st. Decisions will be made by February 5th.

Adriane Brown, PhD Student,
Women’s Studies
The Ohio State University

Here is the link:

http://www.psychsurveys.org/abfox/blogging

We hope to have preliminary results sometime in March and will happily forward those results to people who have expressed interest. “

We encourage contributors to consider the changing cultural perceptions, representations, and expectations associated with fatherhood, and to explore the impact of such changes on their identities as teachers and scholars.  Increasingly, fathers are taking on a more intense role with regard to child-rearing than ever before.  How do today’s male academics view their participation in the parenting process?  How is this changing the nature of the job?  Has the evolving role of the father in contemporary society changed the job itself?

We also welcome essays that focus on how the evolution of fatherhood is changing the face of academia.  Have we seen any concrete changes on college campuses to encourage the “professor as interactive father” schemata?  What is the climate like for male professors who “want it all”? Are they able to balance fatherhood and the road to tenure? What gives?

Editors
Mary Ruth Marotte, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Central Arkansas, where she specializes in women’s studies and critical theory.  Her book, Captive Bodies: American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy and Childbirth, was released by Demeter Press in October 2008.  She lives in Conway, AR with her husband and three children.

Paige Martin Reynolds, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas.  Her specializations include Shakespeare, British Renaissance Drama, Performance Studies, and Elizabeth I.  She has written articles published or forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, ANQ: American Notes and Queries, and 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era.  She lives in Little Rock, AR with her husband and daughter.

Deadline:     March 1, 2009

Length:     1,500 to 4,000 words.

Format:     Essays must be typed, double-spaced, and paginated.  Please include your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and a short bio on the last page.

Contact: mrmarotte AT hotmail DOT com

“Your participation would involve the completion of an anonymous online survey.  The survey contains a mixture of multiple-choice and open-response questions, and should take less than an hour to complete. The survey does not have to be completed in one session.  You may stop at any time and return later to complete it.

“Our hope in conducting this study is that we will gain a better understanding of the role that blogging plays for women maintaining a career and a family in Academia. We thank you in advance for your consideration.  If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by e-mail (anniebfox@gmail.com or annie.fox@uconn.edu) or at the address below.

Please click here for further information and/or to complete the survey.

Andrea O’Reilly will be in Little Rock, AK for a conference Nov 4-8 and Montreal, QC for a Fellowship Nov 11- Dec 10.

While there, she should like to do some interviews for her research on being a mother in academe.

For more information on this study, please visit www.yorku.ca/arm

If you are interested in participating, please email Andrea directly at aoreilly@yorku.ca