MotherNet

Ieva Bisigirskaitė (Vilnius University) in her article “Mothers Challenging “Unsafe” Birth: A Matricentric Feminist Perspective on Maternal Activism in Lithuania” offers a matricentric feminist analysis of two childbirth campaigns in contemporary Lithuania: the movement for the decriminalisation of home births (2012–2019) and the legalisation of elective C-sections by maternal request (2021–2023). Rather than treating these movements as opposites on the “medical” versus “natural” birth axis, the scholar approaches them as forms of maternal activism concerned with reproductive justice. The scholar shows how the punitive discourse of the “bad mother” shapes debates around unconventional birth choices and argues that obstetric violence creates a basis for solidarity between these campaigns.
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Call for chapter proposals: Motherhood, Care and Ageing

Chapter proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary edited volume, Motherhood, Care and Ageing, to be published by De Gruyter Brill.

The volume examines the intersections between motherhood, mothering, care-work and ageing across fields such as History, Literature, Culture, Music, Media Studies, Feminism, and the Social and Medical Sciences.

The aim is to engage with a range of maternal issues that are at once complex and urgent such as: the automatic alignment of motherhood with intensive caring (and the consequences of such relentless pressures on mothers); the experience of mothering in challenging circumstances (precarity, marginalisation, migration); mothering, care and trauma in the case of perinatal loss and preterm births; the oft incompatibility of mothering, caring and the workplace; alternative and nuanced forms of maternal care (such as adoption, grandparents, nannies, caring for elderly parents); ART and the growing phenomenon of entering motherhood (and the care that it entails) later in life as well as menopause and motherhood; and finally, the various types of care (or lack thereof) enacted not by but on mothers, for example, the medical, psychological and emotional care of the mother throughout pregnancy and the antenatal stage. In brief, the volume will demonstrate the richness that a specific focus on motherhood can bring first and foremost to Care Studies, but also how it expands into and complements.

Proposals of up to 250 words, including a title and 3–5 keywords, should be accompanied by a short biography of up to 100 words.

Deadline: 31 May 2026
Contact: Dr Julie Rodgers, Maynooth University
Email: [email protected]

“Motherhood, Subjectivity and Work” is the introductory article to the special issue of Gender, Work & Organisation, authored by Anne O’Brien and Marian Crowley-Henry (Maynooth University), together with Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University).
This special issue explores how the mediation of the dual mother–worker identity becomes internalised by individuals, shaping their subjectivity. Examining the subjectivity of the mother–worker opens up space to further interrogate subjectivity itself: how does social identity shape subjectivity? What processes underpin its formation? How do social context and material practices influence its construction? What does subjectivity do, and how does it, in turn, reformulate social identity? Finally, can subjectivity serve as a space for resistance or change in relation to practices and ideologies that constrain mothers’ engagement with work?
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“Introduction: Motherhood, Mobility, Migration in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing” is a special issue by Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University) and Valerie Heffernan (Maynooth University). Scholars focuses on representations of migrant motherhood that make up a distinct part of all the experiences of motherhood discussed in mainstream literary motherhood studies and yet make for a separate sub-field of investigation. They deal with such issues as language of mothering and writing, linguistic and cultural transmission, maternal marginalisation and guilt, emotional impact of mothering across a cultural divide on both the mother and the child, nurturing cultural belonging in transnational children, and transcultural maternal subjectivity among others.
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Daiva Skuciene and Marian Crowley-Henrey in their research “The rhetoric and reality of social support policies: working mothers’ lived experiences of state and employer support for work-family balance in Lithuania” analyse the role of the state and the employer in supporting work-family balance (WFB) through the lived experiences of working mothers in Lithuania, thereby shedding empirical light on the implementation of WFB policies in a post-Soviet/communist context. This paper, communicated at different international conferences over the MotherNet period, is the result of cooperation across Vilnius University and Maynooth University.
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