[Commlist] CFP - Mediating Mother-Activism

Call for Chapters - edited volume

Mediating Mother-Activism


Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and 
mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. 
Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the 
digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of 
mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via 
the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing 
populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to 
understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but 
agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role 
and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood 
as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be 
contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, 
Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have 
historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences 
of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing 
the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join 
their causes (Logsdon-Conradsen 2011).Notwithstanding, campaigns such 
those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as 
‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same 
narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin 
the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have 
argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has 
the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic 
or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these 
very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015, 
). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan 
‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond 
limits of blood kinship.

A key debate to address is the relation between individual and 
collective in mothers’ digital activism, and how this relation shapes 
the politics of mothering. On the one hand, digital activism is often 
celebrated as connecting ‘private’ individual and personal experiences 
and emotions with the public realm (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 
Papacharissi 2010, Vivienne 2016), something which has perhaps favoured 
‘popular feminism’ in the shape of MeToo and other mobilisations (Baer 
2016, Banet-Weiser 2018). On the other hand, this perspective is often 
criticised as downplaying the potential of digital activism both for 
building collective identifications and projects (Gerbaudo 2012, Dean 
2016, Nunes 2015) and for creating new forms of exclusion and hierarchy 
(Seddighi 2014). In light of discussions around datafication (Lomborg, 
Dencik, & Moe 2020) and disinformation (Bennett & Livingstone 2018), the 
question of how mother-activists utilise digital media affordances to 
shape modalities of political intervention, has become even more important.

The proposed edited volume aims to bring together contributions from a 
broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives with a focus around 
mothering and the uses of social media for social and political change. 
We aim to include conceptual papers as well as empirical studies from a 
broad range of contexts across the global South and global North.

Papers may address one or more of the following topics but are not 
limited to these:

  *

    The relation between digital affordances and mother-activism

  *

    Creating digital political spaces beyond the binary of horizontalism
    vs hierarchy

  *

    Intersectional and decolonial approaches to mediating mother-activism

  *

    Mediating queer mothering

  *

    How to build spaces and practices of solidarity

  *

    Centre-periphery narratives and mothers at the margins: how
    hierarchies and mechanisms of social exclusion are reproduced and/or
    challenged/interrupted

  *

    The mediation of/relations between local, national and transnational
    spaces of mothering

  *

    Temporalities of mothering: memory work; futurities

  *

    Mediated affects and affective practices of mother-activism

  *

    The visual mediation of mothering; tropes, repertoires, disruptions

  *

    Mobilising motherhood and mothering under authoritarian governments

  *

    The deployment of motherhood tropes in right-wing movements; the
    mother figure and racism or nativism

  *

    Mediating motherhood during economic or political crises

  *

    Interrelations and tensions between online and offline activism


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------