(Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvi

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2. Mothering Bodies and Sensations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Breathing Room

      • Agnes Bosanquet, Jayde Cahir, Gail Crimmins, Janet Free, Karina Luzia, Lilia Mantai et al.

      Pages 3-19

   3. Embodied Motherly Research: Re-birthing Sustenance Through the Common (Im)material

      • Sarah Crinall, Anna Vladimirova

      Pages 21-47

   4. Mothering Bodies in Unloving Institutions

      • Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Helen Johnson, Sarah Misra, Agli Zavros-Orr

      Pages 49-82

   5. Creating Spaces of Feminine Possibilities in the Academy

      • Sandy Farquhar, Justine O’Hara-Gregan

      Pages 83-102

   6. (Re)Claiming Our Soulful Intuitive Lives: Initiating Wildish Energy into the Academy Through Story, Dreaming and Connecting with Mother Earth

      • Linda Henderson, Alison L. Black, Prasanna Srinivasan

      Pages 103-127

3. Back Matter

   Pages 129-137

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4. Mothering Relations and Vulnerabilities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 139-139

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   2. The Imperceptible Beingness of M/Otherhood in Academia

      • Anne B. Reinertsen, Bojana Gajic, Louise M. Thomas

      Pages 141-163

   3. Mentoring in the Academy Between Academic Mothers

      • Tina Yngvesson, Susanne Garvis, Donna Pendergast

      Pages 165-184

   4. The Vulnerability of Pregnancy and the Motherhood Myth

      • Liisa Uusimäki, Karmen Johansson

      Pages 185-204

   5. Becoming-with as Becoming-Maternal—Writing with Our Children and Companion Species: A Poetic and Visual Autoethnographic Portrayal of Mothering Assemblages

      • Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Bronte Cutcher, Remy Cutcher, Lily Cutter-Mackenzie, Finley Cutter-Knowles

      Pages 205-247

   6. (Re)Birthing the Academy: Unruly Daughters Striving for Feminist Futures

      • Catherine Manathunga, Barbara Grant, Frances Kelly, Arwen Raddon, Jisun Jung

      Pages 249-268

5. Back Matter

   Pages 269-278

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6. Back Matter

   Pages 279-290

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This book engages expansively with the concept of motherhood in academia, to offer insights into re-imagining a more responsive higher education. Written collaboratively as international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational collectives, the editors and contributors use various ways of understanding ‘motherhood’ to draw attention to – and disrupt – the masculine structures currently defining women’s lives and work in the academy. Shifting the focus from patriarchal understandings of academe, the narratives embrace and champion feminist and feminine scholarship. The book invites the reader to question what can be conceived when motherhood is imagined more expansively, through lenses traditionally silenced or made invisible. This pioneering volume will be of interest and value to feminist scholars, as well as those interested in disrupting patriarchal academic structures. 

• Mother
• Maternal
• Grandmother
• Academic and maternal
• Metaphor in academia
• Feminine academia
• Feminist research
• Motherhood

• Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

  Linda Henderson

• School of Education, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Australia

  Alison L. Black

• Department of Education, Communication & Learning, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

  Susanne Garvis

Linda Henderson is a senior lecturer and feminist early years researcher at the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. Her work draws on poststructural and posthumanist ideas, methodologies, practice and aims to foster connectedness with all living matter in an effort to create a world that values connectedness, heterogeneity, and multiplicity.


Alison L. Black is a senior lecturer and arts-based/narrative researcher in the School of Education at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her research and scholarly work fosters connectedness, community, well-being, and meaning-making through the building of reflective and creative lives and identities.


Susanne Garvis is a professor of child and youth studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has published widely on narrative methodology as well as research with children, teachers and families.

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