Association for Research on Mothering is Closing
Posted March 2nd, 2010 by PhDinParentingI am a mother. I am a feminist. Despite not currently being enrolled at a university, I consider myself an academic and a researcher. I love the Association for Research on Mothering. I love what it stands for. I love its books. I love its journal. I love the fact that it brings thought leadership to the important role that mothers play in society.
Today, I learned that it is closing next month. York University, where it is located, is continuing to refuse to provide any base funding to the association and no one else is stepping up to provide it a home either. You can read the details in a letter from Dr. Andrea O’Reilly over on the Parentopia blog.
I am so much in shock over this that I can’t come up with anything intelligent to say about it, but I am devastated. I own a couple of the books published by Demeter Press and had put the rest of them on my Christmas wish list this past year. They are apparently going to be going on sale at a discount on their website and I plan to buy each and every one that I don’t own already.
But I’m disappointed that there will no longer be a place to bring together the important research on mothering and to foster the research and thinking on this topic. I’m heartbroken that I may never get to read some of the forthcoming books, like Mothering Canada (Spring 2010), Disability and Mothering (Spring 2010), Giving Breast Milk (Spring 2010), The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Fall 2010), You Say You Want a Revolution: The 21st Century Motherhood Movement (Fall 2010), The Palin Factor: Politican Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century (Fall 2010), Adoption and Mothering (Spring 2011), Latina/Chicana Mothering (Fall 2011), Queering Parenting (Spring 2012), Living Feminism Through Mothering (Spring 2012), and Being a Mother Academic: Theory and Narrative (Spring 2012).
Is there someone out there that can save the Association for Research on Mothering? Please tell me there is. This is too precious to lose.
Annie blogs about the art and science of parenting at the PhD in Parenting blog. She is in mourning over this loss.
One Comment
Up with ARM! There’s just gotta be a way.
Thank you for the list of formerly-upcoming journals and books from Demeter Press. It gives a taste of what is being disappeared; silenced.
Part of the beauty of ARM is that is is welcoming to “nonacademics”, marginalized academics, and activists as well as to those with university positions. This is essential to the scholarship of mothering–how could it proceed with any integrity otherwise? And how does the world of academic theory portray and understand mothering without this voice? If I look back to the pre-Demeter Press days, I have to say, “mostly not at all; and when it tried, it usually got it all wrong.”
Without an authentic voice of the mother-world, academia does not only get motherhood wrong; it gets humanity wrong. And if we don’t understand this key part of the human experience–the regenerative part–how on earth can we save ourselves?
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