The Kumu Art Museum, the Estonian Academy of Arts and Rīga Stradiņš University invite you to participate in the interdisciplinary conference Entangled Motherhoods: Care, Politics and Intimacies, which brings together perspectives and experiences from Central and Eastern Europe and serves as a satellite event to the international exhibition Who’s Afraid of Motherhood?, held at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn.
The conference invites participants to critically re-examine historical, cultural and social representations of motherhood and to bring together perspectives derived from lived experience, regional histories and critical theories in order to highlight how motherhood is entangled with social processes and policies, and can catalyse social change, thereby shaping a collective life characterised by openness, equality and solidarity.
We invite contributions – academic papers, round-table discussions, artists talks and world-cafes – to one of the following key themes:
- Constructions of Good Motherhood: Norms, Tensions and Expectations
- Cultural ideals and social expectations surrounding motherhood, and the ways they shape, regulate and constrain maternal identities and practices.
- The Politics of Care and Life-Making Practices
- Questions of who provides care, for whom, under what conditions and with what resources, and how care is entangled with power, social inequality and the distribution of labour.
- Maternal Affects, Self-Care and Intimacies
- The affective, embodied and intimate dimensions of motherhood, including pleasure, ambivalence, exhaustion, rage, vulnerability, agency and practices of self-care.
- Critical Vocabularies: Rethinking Motherhood and Kinship
- New concepts, languages and theoretical approaches for questioning established understandings of mother, parenthood, family, kinship, and maternal subjectivity.
- New Aesthetic Categories in Creative Practices
- Artistic and creative practices that challenge established representations of motherhood and develop new forms, imaginaries and aesthetic languages for articulating maternal experiences.
- Communities, Solidarities and the Commons
- Collective forms of mutual support and solidarity, and alternative ways of organising motherhood and care beyond individualised and privatised models.
To find out more and apply please go to the direct link.
