The incidence of children exposed to drugs and/or alcohol prenatally is rising rapidly especially in Tennessee and increasingly appearing on speech-language pathology caseloads. This session provides background information about problems and neurodevelopmental outcomes. As well, a communication-based intervention approach for babies and their mothers is described with data from case studies. Participants will be able (1) to describe the characteristics of NAS and common neurodevelopmental outcome; (2) to discuss the treatment challenges associated with this population; (3) to identify the benefits and challenges of a communication-based intervention approach for babies exposed prenatally to drugs and their mothers.

The incidence children exposed to drugs and/or alcohol prenatally is rising rapidly and increasingly appearing on speech-language pathology caseloads. This session provides background information about the problems and neurodevelopmental outcomes. As well, a communication-based intervention approach for babies and their mothers is described with data from case studies.

This study explored adolescent girls‟ subjective experiences of being young mothers in school, focusing on their personal and interpersonal relationships within their social contexts. Participants included 15 young black mothers aged between 16 and 19 years from three high schools in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Conducted within a feminist social constructionist framework, the study adopted an exploratory qualitative structure. Data were collected through life histories that were analysed within a thematic narrative framework. The narratives revealed that the young mothers found motherhood challenging and overly disruptive of school. Although contexts of childcare emerged as pivotal in how young mothers balanced motherhood and schoolwork, these were also presented as characterised by notions of power and control. Because of the gendered nature of care work, the women who supported the young mothers with childcare dominated the mothering spheres. The schools were also experienced as controlled and regulated by authorities in ways that constrained the young mothers‟ balancing of school and parenting. Equally constraining to a number of adolescent mothers were structural challenges, for example, parenting in spaces that lacked resources. These challenges were compounded by the immense stigma attached to adolescent motherhood. The study recommended that the Department of Education work closely with all the parties concerned in ensuring that pregnant learners benefit from the policy. It is necessary that educators are encouraged to shift attitudes so that communication with adolescent mothers is improved.

Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth-century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy; in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy; and how selected authors create characters who as mothers fail to protect their children, particularly their daughters. This study explores whether the failure is a result of social-economic or physiological circumstances that make mothering and motherlove impossible or a rejection of the ideal mother seldom realized by contemporary women, or whether the novelists have rewritten the notion of the mother’s help books by their fragmented representations of motherhood. Has motherhood become a rejection of self-potential? The study will critique mother-daughter relationships in four late twentieth-century American novels in their complex presentations of motherhood and surrogacy: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1990), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1997). Appropriated terminology from other disciplines illustrates the prevalence of surrogacy and protection in the subject novels. The use of surrogate will refer to those who come forward to provide the role of mothering and protection.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Psychology

Despite the fact that women make up a large proportion of participants in the environmental justice movement, the movement is still framed in terms of race and class. This thesis investigates the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and environmental justice. I explore the prominent rolls that women play in grassroots environmental justice movements and the look at the discourses that surround gender and environmental justice through a queer studies and ecofeminist lens. I argue that motherhood narratives—while powerful motivators for activists and effective tools for creating resistance—can create a rhetoric that is exclusionary to people with non-normative sexualities and support heteronormative structures which ultimately hurts the movement. I suggest a new rhetoric that embraces plurality of voices including voices of motherhood—one that is based on an understanding of the connection between the oppression of many groups of people, and that of the environment.

Studien belyser hur kvinnor upplever ungt moderskap och möjligheter till att fullfölja gymnasiestudier. Intervjuer har genomförts med fyra kvinnor som blivit föräldrar under sin tid i grundskolan/kring 15/16 års ålder. Undersökningen bygger på kvalitativa intervjuer i form av gruppintervju samt individuell intervju som metod. Resultaten visar att kvinnorna upplever att ansvaret moderskapet medfört har bidragit till att de blivit motiverade till att få ordning på sitt liv och att barnet blivit en symbol för mognad som i flera fall stärkt självbilden. Självkänslan har dock påverkats negativt om man inte lever upp till förväntningarna på sig själv som mamma, vilket dock inte kan kopplas direkt till kvinnornas ålder. En negativ påverkan på självbilden är också om det sociala nätverket kännetecknas av instabila relationer. Resultatet visar att ingen av de intervjuade kvinnorna har fullföljt sina gymnasiestudier. Det har framkommit att den främsta anledningen till avhopp är den ekonomiska situationen. Kvinnornas sociala nätverk som omfattas av både familjemedlemmar, samt aktörer inom utbildningsväsendet möjliggjorde gymnasiestudier för den tid de hade möjlighet att gå. Unikt i denna studie är att mammorna återger att skolorna har anpassats för dem. Vidare har vi analyserat materialet och tolkat att de unga mammorna har skapat sig strategier till hur de förhåller sig till först sina egna föreställningar om andras åsikter och sedan samhällets och omgivningens faktiska åsikter om ungt moderskap. / In this study we examined how Swedish women experience young motherhood in relation to their perceived ability to complete their gymnasium studies. We have interviewed 4 women who became mothers around 15-16 years of age.  The investigation is based mainly on qualitative group and individual interviews. None of the women interviewed had completed their studies, despite that three of the women expressed desire to do so, and the acknowledgement of the existence of a social network of family and community actors making this goal achievable.  Unique to this study’s findings was the perception among the women that the schools themselves had been adapted for them and thus did not present a barrier.  Rather, economic difficulties were cited to be the most common reason for dropping out, with mental health and class identity also cited as complicating factors. We then provide an analysis from feminist and normative perspectives in order to provide a framework for understanding how social norms of gender, age, motherhood can constitute perceived barriers for young mothers who wish to complete their gymnasium education. In particular, this study highlights the importance of further investigation of how economic factors can complicate young parenthood.

IDEOLOGICAL AMBIVALANCE OF MOTHERHOOD IN THE CASE OF &ldquo / MOTHERS OF MARTYRS&rdquo / IN TURKEY Gedik, Esra M.S. Department of Political Science and Public Administration Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sibel Kalaycioglu Co-Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cem Deveci February 2008, 169 pages The main objective of this thesis is to understand how mothers who lost their sons during the conflicts in East and Southeast of Turkey articulate martyrdom of their sons with nationalism, religion and motherhood / how these women who lost their sons, as a woman and a mother define and express themselves and their experiences after martyrdom. Before their sons are martyrized, these women were ordinary housewives, with the death of their sons, they get a new identity: being a mother of a martyr. In this thesis, it is examined that what being a mother of a martyr means for these women. Moreover, this study attempts to examine certain perceptions and assumptions of these women about nationalism, the state, religion, war and peace after martyrdom. For this aim, this study is based on interviews with mothers who do not realize that they virtually live in a war, on motherhood, war, politics, and peace. Therefore, this research is the study to grasp how discourses of nationalism and religion shape this new identity: being a mother of a martyr. While these women were ordinary housewives before martyrdom, after their sons&rsquo / death, their narratives as mothers of martyrs are cultivated by discourses of nationalism and religion. Consequently, is it possible for these mothers to develop an anti-war discourse as happened for examples in the world?

In light of the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States, black women have become the fastest growing incarcerated population in the U.S. Given the fact that more than 75% of incarcerated woman are the primary caregiver for at least one child under the age of 18 the growing incarceration of black women results in the separation of many black mothers from their children. This assault on black motherhood is part of a historically persistent practice of subjugation, control, and maintenance over black women’s reproduction and bodies starting from slavery. This report will not only map this repressive trajectory into the present, but it will also focus on examining black motherhood through the lens of mass incarceration. Furthermore, this report will not only attempt to situate the enduring practice of black women’s subjugation within larger discourses around racism, sexism, oppression, state control, domination, and power but also within an understanding of manifestations of embodied blackness. / text

Through a layered account format combining theory, performative autoethnographic vignettes, and dialogical exchanges, the author explores the performances of Supermotherhood as they materialize within her life and potentially within the lives of, and through interactions with, other mothers inside and outside of her immediate peer group. The author analyses the ways the pervasive ideology of perfect mothering manifests itself within motherhood culture, and how it ultimately impacts maternal agency, self worth, and by extension, the family unit, and the culture of motherhood-mothering in general. Guided by a feminist poststructuralist approach, the author argues that the Supermom, or rather, Super Mom meta-identity offers all subjective labels and ideologies of mothering a place to become and celebrate possibility, individuality, transition, and maternal empowerment. Keywords: mothering; feminism; performative identity; autoethnography; poststructuralist feminism; maternal empowerment; layered account