Mothers and sons: feminist maternal practice with boys

Through in-depth interviews with feminist mothers the research explores women’s experiences of raising sons. Analysis identifies that feminist mothers make a clear distinction between the boy and the discourse about the boy. Their maternal practice contests and shifts the dominant narrative enabling the foundation for the mother and son relationship to write a new script.

Mothers in family literacy : a critical feminist analysis

This research addresses the invisibility of mothers in the Family Literacy movement and explores the work of the mother in maintaining and extending family literacy practices. Despite the centrality of mothers in their children's education, mothers are largely invisable in the research literature theorising and decribing family and intergenerational literacy practices and programs, or they are viewed as somehow deficient in their literacy practices. In this study I aim to address this absence and offer a feminist analysis of the Family Literacy movement throught an exploration of the mother's literacy practices within families. I make visible the complexity of the literacy work performed by mothers within families, and extend further feminist discussion on the body through an analysis of the embodiment of language and literacy practices within the mother/child reading dyad. I reconceptualise family literacy programs within a post structuralist feminist framework, and suggest pedagogies which acknowledge the multiple subjectivities of womenas mothers. learners and teachers of their children.

Negotiating motherhood: the struggles of teenage mothers

Aims. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study exploring how teenagers negotiated motherhood. The main aims of the study were to explore how the young women negotiated motherhood and how they constructed their own identities and relationships through teenage parenting.

Background. Approximately 10% of all births occur to teenage mothers worldwide. This phenomenon is of concern because teenage mothers are reported to be disadvantaged financially, educationally, and cognitively in both the short and long term. Many teenage mothers find strength and fulfillment in their motherhood role but this does not come without cost to themselves or their children, as many teenagers are considered unsuitable to be parents and do not have adequate support.

Design. This interpretive study incorporated ethnographic practices and was guided by feminist principles. After ethical approval from the university, data was collected over a 12-month period from five homeless Australian sole-supporting teenage mothers. Methods used included observation, interviews, field notes, journalling, and discussions with key informants.

Findings. The five participants described stories of disrupted lives, unhappiness in childhood, turmoil during adolescence and a need to find love and connection in their lives. Analysis of the data revealed four major themes; transforming lives and opportunities for change, accommodating the challenges, tolerating the abandonment of supports and living publicly examined lives.

Conclusions. It was concluded that becoming a sole-supporting mother during the teenage years was a difficult struggle for the young women, because of their youth, their lack of preparation for motherhood and their reliance on welfare supports. In addition, they experienced negative public attitudes directed towards them wherever they went, and this included their visits to community child health centres. Recommendations are made for nurses to take a different approach when working with teenage mothers to help ameliorate the negative impact of poor parenting.

Constructing the identities of `responsible mothers, invisible men` in child protection practice

Social constructionism offers valuable insights into the study of social problems for example, poverty, homelessness, crime and delinquency, including how social phenomena 'become' social problems, through social processes of interaction and interpretation. The social construction of child maltreatment has recently emerged as a site of scholarly inquiry and critique. This paper explores through three case studies how 'responsibility for child maltreatment' is constructed in child protection practice, with a specific focus on how 'responsibility' may also be gendered. In particular, how is gender associated with responsibility, such that the identity-pair, 'responsible mothers, invisible men', is a highly likely outcome as claimed in feminist literature? What other assumptions about 'identities of risk' or 'dangerousness' articulate with patriarchy and influence how responsibility is constructed? The case studies explore normally invisible processes by which social categories become 'fact', 'knowledge' and 'truth'. Furthermore, the social construction of 'responsibility for child maltreatment' is extended by a reflexive analysis of my own constructionist practices, as researcher/writer in claims making. The analysis offers an insight into the dynamic and dialectical relationship between professional and organisational knowledge and practice, allowing for a critique of knowledge itself, the basis for the claims made and possible alternative ways of knowing.

A labour of love: mothers, emotional capital and homework

This paper develops a new analysis of homework by building on feminist scholarship which documents the invisible labour done by women in support of their children's education. While numerous studies have examined the relationship between homework and achievement, little attention has been paid to the largely gendered and potentially stressful nature of ‘parental involvement’. The analytic focus in this paper is on the complex emotional and pedagogical dimensions of homework and the ways it is shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Videotaped homework interactions between one working-class and two middle-class mothers and their children are examined using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital. The analysis distinguishes between productive pedagogical relationships and those that promote extensive anxiety and are counterproductive to learning. The paper argues that the reserves of cultural and emotional capital required for homework completion are significant and that class position does not necessarily guarantee the ways in which these capitals are mobilised.

Feminist genealogical methodologies

This paper describes the multi-methodological approach employed in a partial, situated, contingent and interpretive feminist political analysis of Catholic mothers and daughters. The study draws on a number of sources including transcripts of mother- daughter interviews, autobiographical anecdotes, photographs, music, icons of Catholicism and poetry. It is argued in this paper that a feminist multi-methodological approach is valuable to feminist research as it disrupts the linear and logocentric construct of traditional social science research. Moreover, a multi-methodological and multi-sourced approach opens up sites so that the mothers and daughters in this study could be positioned within specific histories and contexts, and provided with a space so that as women they could reconstruct themselves as self-referential subjects.

Centenary celebrations: reinterpreting acting in mothers of France on-line

How is performance on early film newly legible in the digital archive? What implication does this hold for our understanding of film history, especially for our understanding of the actress and her role in the nascent film industry? Taking Sarah Bernhardt’s 1917 film,Mothers of France, as my case study, I join the Women Film Pioneers Project in exploring the digital archive as a necessary tool in feminist film historiography. I argue that the digital archive reconfigures Sarah Bernhardt as an actress who was important not just to the nineteenth century stage but also to the development of the feature film and to its use as a propaganda tool in the Allied war effort. While digital archives such as The European Film Gateway contain a wealth of material about the Great War, Bernhardt’s film reminds us that the digital archive is also an interpretative and critical tool in the re-reading of acting in silent film.

The 'nature' of environmental education research from a feminist poststructuralist viewpoint

For a generation or more, environmental education discourses have been constructed around persistent Cartesian dualisms of modernist thought that divide an "othered" category of being from that of a constituted homogeneous human identity. During the same period, both feminist and poststructuralist theorizing has acted to destabilize the constitution of identities, revealing knowledge, including environmental knowledge, to be multiple, subjective, contingent, and intimately tied in with embodied experiences of place. We explore some of the contingencies of environmental knowledge as revealed through a poststructuralist feminist research methodology and the place for such understandings within an early twenty-first century vision for environmental education research and practice.