MotherNet

Eglė Šumskienė and Violeta Gevorgianienė (Vilnius University) in their article “Solomon Judges Medea: Experiences of Mothers With Intellectual Disabilities Whose Children Were Removed” explore the experiences of mothers with intellectual disabilities in Lithuania whose children were removed from their care. Based on semi-structured interviews with mothers, the scholars analyse how social, institutional and personal circumstances contribute to the loss of parental rights. Drawing on the archetypal figures of Solomon and Medea, the article shows how mothers with intellectual disabilities are often devalued, unsupported and placed in situations where they are set up to fail. It argues that institutional power can separate these women from their children while also erasing their maternal identity.
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Inga Hilbig, Eglė Kačkutė and Vitalija Kazlauskienė in their article “Feelings of maternal guilt among Lithuanian migrant mothers and disharmonious bilingualism: a case study” examine how Lithuanian migrant mothers experience guilt when they feel they have not succeeded in transmitting Lithuanian as a heritage language to their children. Based on five semi-structured in-depth interviews with Lithuanian mothers living in Europe, the scholars analyse the emotional consequences of language transmission within exogamous families. Drawing on critical motherhood theory, scholars shows how strong Lithuanian cultural expectations for mothers to pass on the Lithuanian language unproblematically can intensify maternal guilt and hinder LHL language transmission.
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Ieva Bisigirskaitė (Vilnius University) in her article “Mothers Challenging “Unsafe” Birth: A Matricentric Feminist Perspective on Maternal Activism in Lithuania” offers a matricentric feminist analysis of two childbirth campaigns in contemporary Lithuania: the movement for the decriminalisation of home births (2012–2019) and the legalisation of elective C-sections by maternal request (2021–2023). Rather than treating these movements as opposites on the “medical” versus “natural” birth axis, the scholar approaches them as forms of maternal activism concerned with reproductive justice. The scholar shows how the punitive discourse of the “bad mother” shapes debates around unconventional birth choices and argues that obstetric violence creates a basis for solidarity between these campaigns.
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"My Work Is to Show That It's So Much More Beautiful When You Can Mix": An Interview With Kim Thúy – is a joint publication by VU scholar Eglė Kačkutė and NUIM scholar Valerie Heffernan, which features an interview with the Vietnamese-born Canadian writer Kim Thúy. Kim Thúy is a major diasporic author exploring the intersection of mobility, migration and the maternal in French-language writing. Thúy's debut novel Ru won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction in 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was translated into English and won the 2015 edition of Canada Reads. The interview is preceded by an introduction to her work and scholarly research exploring her work.
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3rd Virtual Global Symposium on Reproduction

CALL FOR PAPERS

Worlds of Birth: Spaces, Practices, & Representations

October 16, 2026

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Anka Dür, architect & midwife - Kim Holden, architect & doula – Claudia Brignone, Director of Il tempo d’attesa (The Waiting, 2023) – Vicky Elson, Director of Laboring Under an Illusion (2009); Elaine Epstein, Director of Arrest the Midwife (2025) – Teresa De Pascale, midwife

Send 200-word Abstract and Short Bio in English by July 15, 2026 to Giulia Po DeLisle ([email protected]) and Laura Lazzari ([email protected])

Worlds of Birth: Spaces, Practices, & Representations

This year's virtual global symposium turns to birth, looking into the spaces, practices, and representations that shape how we come into the world. After two editions dedicated to surrogacy and pregnancy loss, we now want to examine the wide range of ways in which birth has been practiced, imagined, and represented.

Birth is never just a medical event. It happens within traditions, in particular places, and under conditions shaped by history, culture, and environment. Midwives, mothers, healers, and communities have long held knowledge about how to bring a child into the world, knowledge that has been transformed, displaced, or suppressed in different times and places. At the same time, the environment in which birth takes place - the city, the village, the hospital, the birth center, home, the climate, the ecosystem - shapes what is possible for the people giving birth and the people being born.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following dimensions of birth:

Spaces: how hospital, homebirth, birth center, or outdoor settings, as well as the choice of furniture, lights, colors, and the presence of water or earth, can positively or negatively influence the experience of childbirth.

Practices: midwifery, home birth, traditional and Indigenous birthing knowledges, alternative and unassisted birth, and the long tension between medicalized and non-medicalized approaches.

Representations and Environments: how different cultures, geographies, and historical periods have shaped and represented what birth means, who attends it, and how it is remembered; how ecological conditions, climate crisis, environmental injustice, and the geography of access and exclusion shape reproductive experience and birth itself.

We welcome contributions on literature, film, visual art, social media, architecture, and urban studies, and from any disciplinary perspective. Interdisciplinary approaches, transnational, underrepresented, colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives are particularly encouraged.

Scholars interested in participating are invited to submit a title, a 200-word abstract, and a short biography in English by July 15 to

Giulia Po DeLisle ([email protected]) & Laura Lazzari ([email protected]).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 15. Participation is free, and registration will be required to access the virtual symposium. Presentations will be in English.

This Virtual Global Symposium is organized by Dr. Giulia Po DeLisle and Dr. Laura Lazzari with the collaboration of:

The Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; The College of fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; The Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University; The Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical

Call for chapter proposals: Motherhood, Care and Ageing

Chapter proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary edited volume, Motherhood, Care and Ageing, to be published by De Gruyter Brill.

The volume examines the intersections between motherhood, mothering, care-work and ageing across fields such as History, Literature, Culture, Music, Media Studies, Feminism, and the Social and Medical Sciences.

The aim is to engage with a range of maternal issues that are at once complex and urgent such as: the automatic alignment of motherhood with intensive caring (and the consequences of such relentless pressures on mothers); the experience of mothering in challenging circumstances (precarity, marginalisation, migration); mothering, care and trauma in the case of perinatal loss and preterm births; the oft incompatibility of mothering, caring and the workplace; alternative and nuanced forms of maternal care (such as adoption, grandparents, nannies, caring for elderly parents); ART and the growing phenomenon of entering motherhood (and the care that it entails) later in life as well as menopause and motherhood; and finally, the various types of care (or lack thereof) enacted not by but on mothers, for example, the medical, psychological and emotional care of the mother throughout pregnancy and the antenatal stage. In brief, the volume will demonstrate the richness that a specific focus on motherhood can bring first and foremost to Care Studies, but also how it expands into and complements.

Proposals of up to 250 words, including a title and 3–5 keywords, should be accompanied by a short biography of up to 100 words.

Deadline: 31 May 2026
Contact: Dr Julie Rodgers, Maynooth University
Email: [email protected]

“Motherhood, Subjectivity and Work” is the introductory article to the special issue of Gender, Work & Organisation, authored by Anne O’Brien and Marian Crowley-Henry (Maynooth University), together with Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University).
This special issue explores how the mediation of the dual mother–worker identity becomes internalised by individuals, shaping their subjectivity. Examining the subjectivity of the mother–worker opens up space to further interrogate subjectivity itself: how does social identity shape subjectivity? What processes underpin its formation? How do social context and material practices influence its construction? What does subjectivity do, and how does it, in turn, reformulate social identity? Finally, can subjectivity serve as a space for resistance or change in relation to practices and ideologies that constrain mothers’ engagement with work?
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“Introduction: Motherhood, Mobility, Migration in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing” is a special issue by Eglė Kačkutė (Vilnius University) and Valerie Heffernan (Maynooth University). Scholars focuses on representations of migrant motherhood that make up a distinct part of all the experiences of motherhood discussed in mainstream literary motherhood studies and yet make for a separate sub-field of investigation. They deal with such issues as language of mothering and writing, linguistic and cultural transmission, maternal marginalisation and guilt, emotional impact of mothering across a cultural divide on both the mother and the child, nurturing cultural belonging in transnational children, and transcultural maternal subjectivity among others.
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Daiva Skuciene and Marian Crowley-Henrey in their research “The rhetoric and reality of social support policies: working mothers’ lived experiences of state and employer support for work-family balance in Lithuania” analyse the role of the state and the employer in supporting work-family balance (WFB) through the lived experiences of working mothers in Lithuania, thereby shedding empirical light on the implementation of WFB policies in a post-Soviet/communist context. This paper, communicated at different international conferences over the MotherNet period, is the result of cooperation across Vilnius University and Maynooth University.
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Sarah Arnold in her chapter “Mothering as the Intersection of Class, Care and the Corporeal: Representing the Maternal in Contemporary Irish Film and Television Drama” explores the shift from conservative and traditional notions of self-sacrifice towards a more inclusive and non-essentialist representation of motherhood and the maternal. The analysed texts include films such as “A Bump along the Way” (2019), “Herself” (2020), “You Are Not My Mother” (2021) and “An Cailín Ciúin” (2022) as well as television drama series such as “Normal People” (2020) and “Kin” (2021-2022). The scholar argues that motherhood is represented through an interrelation between social class, practices of care and the body as a site of maternity. Mothering, in these texts, is not necessarily associated with 'being the mother' but is produced through a nexus of body/biology, behaviour/action and social class/economic status.
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