motherhood Archives

Precarious Motherhood explores the experiences of racially minoritised mothers living with insecure immigration status and financial hardship in London, UK. It exposes the impact of hostile immigration policies and precarity on mothers’ interpersonal relationships and access to support. The author draws attention to how mothers manage the constraints they face and enact belonging. She then explores the impact on mothers’ couple relationships, friendships, adult kin relationships and faith-based networks. The book underlines the vital role of personal relationships in providing access to resources and support, but also demonstrates how precariously positioned mothers must carefully navigate relational tensions in their everyday lives. It highlights how social infrastructure facilitates relational practices, helping mothers to sustain their children’s wellbeing and their own.

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection of 18 chapters brings into dialogue authors from a range of geographical contexts, social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. The wide variety of subjects include refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence and childcare and education.

Chapter authors focus on local contexts as well as their global interconnections, and draw on diverse theoretical traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, postcolonialism, political economy, and the ethics of care. Together the contributions offer new ways to conceptualise relations between women and children, and to address injustices faced by both groups.