Thesis advisor: Eve Spangler / Using a three article, mixed methods format, this dissertation will examine the profound pressures placed on women to conform to "good" mothering standards within the context of raising children with neurological disabilities. Furthermore, this work will offer critical insights into political and bureaucratic mechanisms that present barriers to mothers' advocacy on behalf of their children with neurological disabilities. * Article One will explore the cultural context and performance of intensive mothering as well as structural barriers to fulfilling the image of a "good mother" from the standpoint of middle class mothers raising children with neurological disabilities. * Article Two will consider low income mothers' experiences navigating bureaucratic support systems for children with neurological disabilities and situate those experiences within the context of the intensive mothering ideal. * Article Three will examine the bureaucratic systems designed by a patchwork of federal laws to support people with disabilities and their families and how these systems both aid and undermine mothers' achievement of the intensive mothering ideal. Ultimately, this work will be used to shape policy recommendations to facilitate mothers' increased access to needed supportive services for children with neurological disabilities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Due to the ever-growing crisis of orphaned and vulnerable children in South Africa, research into strategies of care remains a crucial pursuit. Models of care in the country currently range from informal to formal, including informal fostering / non-statutory foster care; community-based support structures; home-based care and support; unregistered residential care; statutory adoption and foster care; and statutory residential care. This research study focuses on the area of adoption and fostering. Existing adoption and fostering research, locally and internationally, concentrates on the adopted and fostered child with little consideration given to parents. Mothering adopted and foster children in South Africa is a specifically under-researched area. This research contributes within this field, specifically, by exploring how women who have adopted and/or who foster children construct mothering and how these constructions intersect with dominant discourses of mothering. This qualitative study utilises a postmodern and poststructuralist ontology, and both social constructionist and feminist epistemologies. In-depth interviews were conducted with 21 adoptive and foster mothers and data were analysed through discourse analysis. Ten key discourses and eight main constructs emerged. Participants engaged with discourses of natural mothering, and good mothering in which the constructs of the good mother, the good adoptive mother and the good foster mother operate. These two broad discourses are informed by the construct of the family. Constructions of adoption and fostering are formed in relation to notions of the family; and this family construct also largely informs and is informed by the discourse of legitimate belonging, the construct of the child; and the discourse of collaborative parenting. These discourses and constructs have conversations with and are formed in relation to broader discourses of gender, race, culture and HIV/AIDS. Adoption and fostering occur in relation to discourses that operate within the institution and in relation to dealing with the institution as a construct. Finally, engagement with these discourses and constructs inform how the discourse of support is constructed in relation to adoptive and foster mothering. Through exploring these constructs and discourses in relation to one another, three key arguments emerged. The first relates to a mechanism of how the ideology of intensive mothering operates through the manner in which it constructs natural mothering and good mothering. The second conclusion reached is that ambivalence is a key component of the constructions of adoptive and foster mothers. Thirdly, the study indicates that the construct of the good mother, as it operates within the ideology of intensive mothering, is resistant to deconstruction. After proceeding through the analysis, and exploring how the findings intersect particularly with discourses within the ideologies of patriarchy, technology, capitalism and race, the study offers specific recommendations for the support of adoptive and foster mothers. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Psychology / unrestricted

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Abstract: Mothers and children are an increasingly significant segment of the population in Canada experiencing homelessness. Yet, there is a paucity of literature that focuses on the lived experience of mothers while caring for children within the social constructs of a shelter. It is therefore important to explore the subjective experience of women, and how they conceptualize the meaning of their experiences. The purpose of this study was twofold: To broaden our understanding of mothers' daily reality of caring for their children in the shelter environment, and to highlight the way discourses engender Othering processes. The project was supported by the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and feminists Chris Weedon, and Mary Canales. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 mothers living with their children in four diverse shelter settings in a large urban centre in Canada. The interviews were conducted in English, French and with a cultural interpreter. Heidegger's interpretive phenomenology was used to analyze the data. Major findings suggest mothers experience a disruption in their capacity to care for their children on several levels: mothers are stigmatized and positioned as Other through exclusionary shelter practices; mothers are subjugated to paternalistic shelter rules that exert an emotional labour resulting from inconsistencies in shelter policies and practices; and mothers are burdened by the pervasive ongoing experience of violence. Results of this study suggest that in order to design services that effectively support optimal health and social outcomes for mothers and their children, it is important for public health providers, service providers and policy makers to be informed of the meaning of "being a mother in a shelter". -- Résumé: Les mères et les enfants représentent un segment de plus en plus important de la population canadienne vivant en situation d'itinérance. Pourtant, peu d’écrits se concentrent sur l'expérience vécue des mères qui s'occupent de leurs enfants dans le contexte social d'un refuge. Il est donc important d'explorer l'expérience subjective des femmes et la manière dont elles conceptualisent le sens de leurs expériences. L'objectif de cette étude est double : élargir notre compréhension de la réalité quotidienne des mères qui s'occupent de leurs enfants dans l'environnement d'un refuge, et mettre en évidence la manière dont les discours engendrent des processus d'altérité. Le projet était basé sur les cadres théoriques de Michel Foucault et des féministes Chris Weedon et Mary Canales. Des entrevues semi-structurées ont été menées auprès de 30 mères vivant avec leurs enfants dans quatre refuges d'un grand centre urbain au Canada. Les entrevues ont été menées en anglais, en français et avec un interprète culturel. La phénoménologie interprétative de Heidegger a été utilisée pour interpréter les données. Les principaux résultats suggèrent que les mères connaissent une perturbation dans leur capacité à prendre soin de leurs enfants à plusieurs niveaux; que les mères sont stigmatisées et positionnées comme « autres » par le biais de pratiques d'exclusion dans les refuges; que les mères sont domestiquées par les règles paternalistes du refuge qui exercent un labeur émotionnel résultant d'incohérences dans les politiques et les pratiques; et qu'elles font l'expérience omniprésente et continue de la violence. Les résultats de cette étude suggèrent que pour concevoir des services qui soutiennent efficacement les mères et leurs enfants sur les plans social et de la santé, il est important que les prestataires de santé publique, les prestataires de services et les décideurs politiques soient informés de ce que veut dire « être une mère dans un refuge ».

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Sylvia Plath utilizes confessional poetry to subvert traditional gender roles and provide commentary on the expectations of those positions in both the domestic and social spheres. I argue that Plath uses the motherigure and her relationship to children in order to exploit this role, and in the distance that she places between the two, she provides a new role for the female speaker. I also discuss my own poetry’s use of the motherigure. In the second part of my thesis, I explore this and other feminine concerns through poetry.

Home-school relations are critical in determining how the educational process interacts with and is shaped by various social, cultural, political, and economic institutions. I focus my research on the educational involvement of mothers who volunteer at the elementary level in both the U.S. and Taiwan to seek a cross-cultural perspective on the structural inequalities embedded within home-school relations through the examination of mothers¡¦ roles on the one hand and the school¡¦s expectations on the other hand. By interviewing volunteering mothers and school administrators at one elementary school in each country, I discovered differences as well as similarities, reflected in the dominant mothering and educational discourses in the two countries. This qualitative cross-cultural study suggests a need to incorporate cultural and institutional variables currently outside of social and cultural capital-based frameworks in understanding the dynamics of home-school relations.

In the era of globalisation, studies of migration focus on mobility, deterritorialised identities and diasporic forms of belonging across nation state boundaries. Indeed, uprootedness from the soil of home and place has resulted in a general condition of �homelessness� in late modernity, referred to as the diasporic condition. The search for an �absolute home� has become the Holy Grail for pilgrims in late modernity and forms the basis for this study, which explores the �migrant�s conundrum�: does home move where the migrant moves, or is it forever tied to the primordialism of place, soil and kinship? Through an examination of the construction of homeliness amongst an immigrant community of 500 households from the village of Hadchit, North Lebanon, who reside in Western Sydney, Australia it will be shown how their strategies of home-building depend upon the capacity to imagine themselves as being united by kinship, a shared village of origins and as part of the broader communal Maronite identity (Mwarne), which now transcends nation state boundaries. Patrilineage (bayt), village (day�aa) and sect (ta�eefa) have historically defined Lebanese sectarian identities and now, as this study shows, are deployed as a strategy of home-building and community construction in diaspora. However, capitalist social relations of production in Sydney have transformed bayt, day�aa and ta�eefa amongst the second generation through the gendered renegotiation of the marriage contract from relations of descent to relations of consent. Thus, the Hadchitis now face a crisis of (re)production and attribute this to the Australian state being hukum niswen, ruled by women, an inversion of the gendered order of power in Lebanon. Through pilgrimages to the ancestral village �migr�s seek a spiritual resolution to the contradictions of migration through the restoration of their connection to place, but find they cannot seamlessly belong in Hadchit. Meanwhile, multicultural crisis and a milieu of anti-Lebanese racism limit their claims to national belonging in Australia. This study finds that the contradictions of the migration process are unresolvable through physical mobility, because the feeling of �home� is ultimately an affective and social construction that transcends place. The elusive quality that defines home and provides a sense of unconditional belonging is, in fact, socially constructed by women, through their daily practices of care within the home and the most important woman for the construction of homeliness is the matriarch, sit el bayt � the power of the house. Thus, the place where the immigrant can be at home is metaphorically at their �mother�s table�. The shifting and gendered construction of home amongst the Hadchitis in Sydney has also led to a transformation of cultural identity amongst them. Through the process of migration, (re)production and return the Hadchitis have become Lebanese-Australians.

There is emerging evidence that after infertility and assisted conception women are at increased risk of early parenting difficulties. The aims of this study were to characterize postpartum psychological functioning of women conceiving through assisted reproductive technology (ART) and to identify factors that may be associated with early parenting difficulties defined as: postpartum psychological distress, low maternal confidence and admission to residential early parenting services. (For complete abstract open document)

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