Seminars

Title: Reflections on a Cross-Cultural Study of Motherhood and Consumption

Presenter: Andrea Prothero (Associate Professor at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, Dublin) on behalf of the VOICE group

This presentation focuses on a collective, collaborative research project focusing on motherhood and consumption in Denmark, Ireland, the UK and the USA, which began in September 2005. The study itself is interpretive, exploring consumption experiences and the transition of expectant mothers. It focuses on within and across culture differences and similarities of our participants, who were interviewed pre and post the birth of their first child. Other forms of data were also collected, including consumption diaries and photographs of certain goods that were either purchased or received in other means, such as gifts or on loan.

The presentation will also consider the VOICE group and the challenges and opportunities of collaboration on an interpretive research project across four countries and with eight authors. Whilst collaborating academically within multi-author teams is a common occurrence, reflections on research teamwork are relatively rare, and this presentation addresses this issue.

(This paper is the result of collective, collaborative research undertaken by members of The VOICE Group. The members of this group, in alphabetical order, are Andrea Davies (Leicester University), Susan Dobscha (Bentley University), Susi Geiger (University College Dublin), Stephanie O'Donohoe (The University of Edinburgh), Lisa O'Malley (University of Limerick), Andrea Prothero (University College Dublin), Elin Sørensen (University of Southern Denmark), Thyra Uth Thomsen (Copenhagen Business School).)

Title: Material Culture, Mothers and the Market

Presenter: Alison J. Clarke (Professor in Design History at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria)

Women's experiences and practices as mothers are inescapably bound to specific worlds of objects, brands and goods. Contemporary popular culture increasingly focuses on critiques of mothers (encapsulated by the media generated definitions such as 'yummy mummy'/'slummy mummy') almost exclusively in terms of social class relationships to cultures of consumption. Should we extend the dyadic understanding of mothers and infants as mutually constituting, to one that more resembles a triangulated structure of mothers, infants and things? How is the understanding of the interrelation of mothers and markets furthered through analysis of the brands, goods and designs inculcated in this process? How might understandings of social class be enhanced by cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary inquiries that acknowledge commodities as integral agents, rather than passive reflections, of certain forms of mothering? Where does the agency of the infant/child reside in these configurations?

This discussion considers the challenges of inter-disciplinary research in the area of mothers and consumption and the potential cross-overs into childhood studies. It explores the methodological and theoretical possibilities of the object based inter-disciplinary fields (material culture and design history) in addressing the intertwined relation of children, mothers, markets and goods and their historical trajectories.

Title: Situations in a common culture: Interdisciplinary strategies for mapping modern motherhood

Presenters: Mary Jane Kehily (Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies, Open University) and Rachel Thomson (Professor of Social Research, Open University)

Commercialisation and commodification have transformed the meaning and experience of mothering in the post war period, with the greater availability of labour saving devices and the stylising of pregnancy and baby-hood characterising perceptions of the contemporary period. The material culture of pregnancy and new motherhood is an important site for the construction of identities and the performance of cultural distinction between women. The Making of Modern Motherhood is an ESRC funded study documenting and exploring the diversity and coherence of motherhood as a contemporary identity. The study brings together methodologies and analytic frameworks from sociology and cultural studies in order to explore the dynamic relationship between the very different situations that constitute motherhood and the common popular culture through which mothering is represented and consumed. In this paper we explain how we combined disciplinary traditions, synthesising an analysis of pregnancy magazines, visual documentations of expectant mothers' preparations for birth, and the interview accounts of 62 women. We focus on the way in which age operates as a canonical category for the construction of contemporary mothering as 'too early', 'too late' or 'just right' – and the ways in which these categories resonate with popular representations of mothering.

Title: Promoting interdisciplinary research on families and food

Presenter: Peter Jackson (Professor in Human Geography, University of Sheffield and Director of 'Changing Families, Changing Food')

This presentation will focus on the challenges of promoting interdisciplinary research on families and food, drawing on the recent experience of directing a large research programme on 'Changing Families, Changing Food' (funded by The Leverhulme Trust). The programme attempted to provide a new perspective on family life by approaching family through the lens of food. The 15 constituent projects were organised into three strands stretching across the life-course from pregnancy and motherhood to childhood and family life, out into the wider community. A fourth strand provided an historical dimension (via quantitative and qualitative 'time-lines') and some international comparisons (with Hungary and Japan), designed to highlight the specificity of food and family issues in contemporary Britain. The research team included experts from the health and clinical sciences and from nursing and midwifery, as well as nutritionists, sociologists, geographers and historians based at the University of Sheffield and at Royal Holloway-University of London. The project ran from just over three years and finishes in December 2008. The presentation will focus on some of the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration including a paper about food consumption in non-domestic settings that draws on the findings of four separate projects and a project on changing representations of diet and health in women's magazines that combined the skills of a nutritionist and a cultural historian. The presentation will also highlight some of the challenges of working across disciplinary boundaries including the 'translation' of different research vocabularies, traditions and approaches, and different expectations and conventions regarding joint publication.

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