Linda Henderson & Alison L. Black 
(Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe 
Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts

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. 

Table of Content

THEME I. Mothering bodies and sensations.- Chapter 1. Breathing room; Agnes Bosanquet, Jayde Cahir, Gail Crimmins, Janet Free, Karina Luzia, Lilia Mantai and Ann Werner.- Chapter 2. Embodied motherly research: Re-birthing sustenance through the common (im)material; Sarah Crinall and Anna Vladimirova.- Chapter 3. Mothering bodies in unloving institutions; Louise Phillips, Helen Johnson, Sarah Misra and Agli Zazros-Orr.- Chapter 4. Creating spaces of feminine possibilities in the academy; Sandy Farquhar and Justine O’Hara-Gregan.- Chapter 5. (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 and Prasanna Srinivasan.- Response: Mothering bodies and sensations: The sound of lamentation: Hearing maternal academic subjects; Alison Bartlett.- THEME II. Mothering relations and vulnerabilities.- Chapter 6. The imperceptible beingness of m/otherhood in academia; Anne B. Reinertsen, Bojana Gajic and Louise Thomas.- Chapter 7. Mentoring in the academy between academic mothers; Tina Yngvesson, Susanne Garvis and Donna Pendergast.- Chapter 8. The vulnerability of pregnancy and the motherhood myth; Liisa Uusimäki and Karmen Johansson.- Chapter 9. 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 and Finley Cutter-Knowles.- Chapter 10. (Re)birthing the academy: Unruly daughters striving for feminist futures; Catherine Manathunga, Barbara Grant, Frances Kelly, Arwen Raddon and Jisun Jung.- Response: Double-time: Motherhood and professorhood; Laurel Richardson.

About the author

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.