Genealogy

5 pages, 178 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’

by Jayne Osgood and Allison Sterling Henward

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020039 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2359

This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

11 pages, 228 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mothering in Hindsight: Troubling Time(s)

by Marie Lavelle

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020036 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3379

Abstract

This article draws on a small-scale study that explored the (re)configuring, (re)turning and (re)working of the experiences of mothering as seen from a position of looking back in hindsight. Temporality is implicated in several ways within this paper, deeply entwined and constantly shifting. [...] Read more.

This article draws on a small-scale study that explored the (re)configuring, (re)turning and (re)working of the experiences of mothering as seen from a position of looking back in hindsight. Temporality is implicated in several ways within this paper, deeply entwined and constantly shifting. Researching past events, experiences and emotions that appear in a location not of the present is problematic, especially when time is conceptualised chronologically. Making sense of past experiences of mothering in the present exposed parenting as not necessarily something that can be detached from the past or as an experience that lies in the past, but rather something where the past is very much present. Here, Barad’s diffractive methodologies, along with the work of Bennett, on new materialism is utilised to explore the temporal nature of mothering. Nine mothers whose children were aged 18–30 were asked “what do you wish you had known then that you know now about being a parent?” Objects kept from when their children were young were initially used to mobilise the temporal and the affective. However, the study itself, the journeys to mothers’ homes, the interviews, the pen, paper, recordings, photos and the files that stand waiting to be reached and the objects mothers brought have become entwined. This is also true for the new entanglements and engagements with post-humanist theory that unearthed themselves to me in the journey to this point in the process. The paradoxical nature of time evident in the narratives women shared, continued to shape early parenting experiences of how mothers perceived themselves through the constant (re)visiting, (re)evaluating and (re)analysing of these experiences is simultaneously reflected in the spacetimemattering of doing this research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

11 pages, 218 KiB

Open AccessArticle

I Am Roha’s Emaye: A Critical Autoethnography of Mothering in Liminal Spaces

by Kara Roop Miheretu and Allison Sterling Henward

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 35; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020035 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2397

Abstract

In this critical autoethnographic study, we examine how one woman, Roha’s emaye (Amharic for mother), developed necessary racialized subjectivities as mother of a child who codes as Black in contemporary U.S. society. While substantial research outlines how mothers of color must prepare children [...] Read more.

In this critical autoethnographic study, we examine how one woman, Roha’s emaye (Amharic for mother), developed necessary racialized subjectivities as mother of a child who codes as Black in contemporary U.S. society. While substantial research outlines how mothers of color must prepare children to live in a racist world; typically, this perspective focuses on the child. Often, it excludes how mothers—both Black and White—must ‘do’ identity work to make sense of this. Although race is a social and cultural construct, when women cross the color line to partner and have children, the challenges they face both as part of a couple and mother are real. Data are drawn from journals and memories, blending self-observation and reflexive investigation as fieldwork to intentionally comment on and critique cultural practices surrounding mothering and subjectivity. Data were analyzed using Foucauldian concepts of Genealogy, Power, and Subjectification. Findings indicate that this mother was constructed, regulated, normalized, and categorized and found to occupy multiple liminal spaces. This paper argues that tracing how particular subjectivities are given power and regulated in specific contexts of mothering contributes nuanced understandings of how race comes to matter, for whom, and when. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

15 pages, 261 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Pets that Have ‘Something Inside’: The Material Politics of in/Animacy and Queer Kin within the Childhood Menagerie

by Riikka Hohti and Jayne Osgood

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020038 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3373

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring [...] Read more.

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hohti and Tammi 2019; Taylor 2011; Malone 2015) reveals child–animal relations to be charged with various pedagogical and ideological assumptions, which we argue are partly exported to the relations that form between children and their toys. We undertake a close examination of the relationalities between humans and a range of toys as a means to explore the ways in which care and liveliness materialize in childhood play and what this means for our conceptualizations of ‘the family’. We put to work the idea of queer worlding (Haraway 2008; Osgood and Andersen 2019) and animacy (Chen 2012) alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, 2011) feminist ethics of care. We then specifically focus on the materiality of robotic toys to illustrate some crucial connectivities and erasures to examine how the queer human–animal and animate–inanimate boundaries are reworked and negotiated in childhood play. These processes create a shift in understanding what matters in children’s lives and how materiality and affective forces co-constitute the posthuman family. This paper engages critically with the ambivalences and tensions that emerge within the domestic menagerie and extend to a planetary scale in ways that are inherently political. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

27 pages, 10852 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Growing Communities in a Garden Undone: Worldly Justice, Withinness and Women

by Simone Miranda Blom and Sarah Crinall

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 42; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020042 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2497

Abstract

Where communities are ecological and humans are nature, ways of reimagining and regenerating communities as human and more, offer a timely response to the call of the Anthropocene for worldly justice. We, the authors, as women and mothers, look into time, place and [...] Read more.

Where communities are ecological and humans are nature, ways of reimagining and regenerating communities as human and more, offer a timely response to the call of the Anthropocene for worldly justice. We, the authors, as women and mothers, look into time, place and space, harvesting our ‘becoming (undone)’ for the reader, seeded in the botanical world. Creeping and whispering, still and subtle, plant species are ever present in our survival yet often go unnamed and unnoticed, and to date are under-represented in multi-species becoming research. Via Foucault’s shining light upon power, we muse with Barad, Haraway and Grosz—how does growing (with) plant-life, amongst what is ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’, matter (to) the world as it turns? We have been returned to the same sediment after a decade: Our bowed-together life revived in the childhood–motherhood–nature community entanglements of the Anthropocene. Now, this paper, waters plant–human relationalities living beyond the traditional parochial human-to-human role. We accept our humanness in its onerousness and ownership but look to the leaf litter to reacquaint with our multispecies lives in a garden that has, at times, been sacrificed and lost. Our contribution is chlorophyllic. New ideas enfold and energise what constitutes a community. As women woven with botanica and academia, where mothering is a collaboration rather than a raising, we invite the reader to journey with us into the worldly, life-giving relations that garden a community undone. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

13 pages, 234 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The New Educational Pastorate: Link Workers, Pastoral Power and the Pedagogicalisation of Parenting

by Nathan Fretwell

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 37; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020037 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 5498

Abstract

Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades. This article examines a parenting support initiative distinctive for [...] Read more.

Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades. This article examines a parenting support initiative distinctive for its use of link workers in mobilising ‘hard to reach’ parents to engage more effectively with their children’s education. Drawing on qualitative data gathered during the evaluation of the initiative, the article frames link worker–parent interactions as a form of everyday government and pastoral power. Link workers constitute a new educational pastorate; through friendship, care and control they exercise pastoral power over parents. Building on recent research into the role of ‘pastors’ in producing neoliberal subjectivities within the National Health Service, the article foregrounds their efforts to foster responsible, self-disciplined agency in parents. Link workers, it is argued, contribute to a responsibilisation and pedagogicalisation of the family, which has produced new figures of mothering/parenting, reconfigured the meaning of the home and extended the scope of state intervention into family life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

16 pages, 2257 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards an Ethico-Aesthetic of Parenting: Sensing Ritornellos of Play with GoPro Data

by Laura Trafí-Prats and Lucy Caton

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 34; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020034 - 31 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5951

Abstract

This article argues for an ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of parenting, and its critiques. This ethico-aesthetic approach focuses on affect and the intensification of collective life. In the article, it is explored in connection to a group [...] Read more.

This article argues for an ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of parenting, and its critiques. This ethico-aesthetic approach focuses on affect and the intensification of collective life. In the article, it is explored in connection to a group of parents and children under six who participated in a play event called Moving with lines and light. As parents, researchers and players who participated in this play event, the authors think together with fragments of GoPro data and the concept of the ritornello. They do this as an exercise in sensing the non-linear time of parenting in/with the play through a prolonged, active and relational process of recollection and narration that combines analogic and technologic events. With these, the authors discuss the parenting body in postdevelopmental modes of existence organized around sense, territory and technicity that propel a thinking of parenting beyond practices of symbolic control, and as living ecologies of action. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

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18 pages, 248 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Silenced Motherhood(s): Forbidden Motherings in the Early Childhood Classroom

by Dana Frantz Bentley

Genealogy 2020, 4(2), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020041 - 31 Mar 2020

Viewed by 2444

Abstract

What is the role of mothering in the early childhood classroom? Given the focus of the field of “professionalization” and “scientific” practices, how might the role of maternal nurturance be woven into our understandings of pedagogies? This paper addresses the disempowerment experienced by [...] Read more.

What is the role of mothering in the early childhood classroom? Given the focus of the field of “professionalization” and “scientific” practices, how might the role of maternal nurturance be woven into our understandings of pedagogies? This paper addresses the disempowerment experienced by an early childhood practitioner when maternal subjectivities and practices are framed as oppositional to the “professionalization” of the field. Through narrative research as a teacher-scholar, I explore my own experiences around my role as “not-mother” in the classroom, looking critically at the interwovenness of mothering and teaching in classroom relationships and communities. Through this narrative examination, I explore the role of maternal relationships in early childhood, in conversation with my practices of mothering as the teacher-not-mother. Through narrative inquiry and analysis, I attempt to make visible the forbidden subjectivities of the not-mother, and her centrality to meaningful early childhood pedagogy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

10 pages, 218 KiB

Open AccessArticle

‘Sexual Orientation’ in Swedish Preschool Policy—What Is the Problem?

by Lena Sotevik

Genealogy 2020, 4(1), 28; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010028 - 17 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3142

Abstract

The present article focuses on how ‘sexual orientation’ is represented and produced in a Swedish preschool policy document regarding discrimination and equal treatment. ‘Poststuctural policy analysis’ is employed, in line with Foucault) and Bacchi. The results show that ‘sexual orientation’ is represented as [...] Read more.

The present article focuses on how ‘sexual orientation’ is represented and produced in a Swedish preschool policy document regarding discrimination and equal treatment. ‘Poststuctural policy analysis’ is employed, in line with Foucault) and Bacchi. The results show that ‘sexual orientation’ is represented as a matter for families, but for parents rather than children. In the plans for equal treatment, visualizing different families stands out as the goal of working preventively against discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation’ in preschool, and the active measures planned for are reading books and spontaneous conversations. The article argues that the discrimination perspective represented in the documents, together with discourses on childhood innocence, establish certain conditions for how ‘sexual orientation’ is produced in preschool. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reimagining ‘Childhood, Motherhood, Family and Community’)

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