Good Mothers: A Multi-modal Personal History and Literature Review Examining “Good Mother” Discourse and the Implications for Scholar-Moms

Dominant discourses promote breastfeeding as essential to “good mothering,” shown in research to set a difficult standard that many white mothers internalize. Little is known about African American mothers’ perceptions of the connection between breastfeeding and mothering ideals. We analyzed perceptions of the relationship between breastfeeding and formula feeding and mothering through in-depth semistructured interviews with 22 predominantly middle-class African American mothers in the southeastern United States who breastfeed. One-third of participants upheld the dominant ideology that breastfeeding is required for good mothering, constructing formula feeding as lazy and selfish. Two-thirds associated breastfeeding with “extraordinary mothering,” exceeding good mothering through additional hard work, self-sacrifice, and dedication. These participants were divided, with half (one-third of total) stating that mothers who formula feed are also good mothers and half (one-third of total sample) expressing ambivalence toward formula. Both groups acknowledged structural barriers and personal circumstances that prevent some mothers from breastfeeding, and therefore they either withheld or were conflicted about applying judgment. These findings confirm that although a powerful cultural association between breastfeeding and good mothering is evident, it is not uniform across race and class.

Aim/Purpose: This study focuses on how a short-term international study abroad program to England impacted doctoral students’ cultural competencies. Background: The case study captures the experiences of six school leadership doctoral students who traveled abroad to East London, England. The overarching goal of this experience was to improve their self-efficacy for culturally competent school leadership. Methodology: Through this case study of six doctoral students in an educational leadership doctoral program, the researchers sought to answer the following question: How do knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors around cultural competencies of U.S. school leaders shift because they participated in an international internship? Through pre-post surveys and follow-up interviews, the researchers explored how the international experience impacted cultural competencies. Contribution: The primary goal of this experience was to improve self-efficacy for culturally responsive school leadership. The doctoral students were either aspiring school leaders or were currently serving as a building leader of a P-12 school. It is from these students that we can learn how a short-term international experience might impact school leaders, and in return, the students and staff they serve. This study adds to the limited literature about the benefits of study abroad programs for educational leadership students in doctoral programs. Findings: The doctoral students in this case study gained knowledge and skills because of this study abroad. Knowledge was gained about educational systems and self-awareness. Skills learned included relationship skills, travel skills, and skills related to empowering teachers. Attitudes about diversity shifted to be more encompassing. Further, the behaviors of doctoral students changed because of this trip. The results from the pre-test and post-test on cultural competence indicated a significant improvement in cultural competence for the group. Recommendations for Practitioners: The knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behavioral shifts captured in this study spoke to profound growth around cultural competencies. It is through preparing these doctoral students before the international sojourn, guiding them during the experience, and following up with them upon return that we were able to create a supportive, meaningful, and impactful study abroad experience for future school leaders. Thus, these experiences will likely impact their collective leadership in the future. Recommendation for Researchers: Though research about the benefits of study abroad programs for graduate students is limited, several studies are about the benefits of study abroad and international programs in undergraduate education. There is all but a lack of literature focused on doctoral educational leadership students and study abroad. Nevertheless, for many students who choose to study overseas, it may be the first opportunity they have to explore a new country and to be fully immersed in a culture that is different from their own. Through these experiences, many development opportunities can affect how students view their professional work. Impact on Society: Through exposure to others, by experiencing diverse ways of thinking and doing, and through critical conversation, institutions of higher education can develop school leaders to be culturally competent, culturally responsive, and socially just. As demonstrated in this study, international experiences are one decisive way to start this conversation. Future Research: Research has shown that it is possible to increase students’ cultural competence through study abroad. As such, in the current study, the researchers took a mixed methods approach to understand how cultural competencies around knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors shifted. As a result, we found that each doctoral student increased their cultural awareness in significant ways. Students gained knowledge by comparing the cultures within education systems and gained self-awareness about their own cultural awareness issues. More research needs to be done to better understand the impact of study abroad experiences on graduate students in educational leadership programs. These experiences could be short experiences (i.e., one to two weeks) or longer experiences (i.e., more than two weeks). Further, focusing on developing cultural competency before, during, and after a trip in different educational fields other than educational leadership (e.g., literacy, curriculum & instruction) could have significant school-level effects. Lastly, extending study abroad experiences into locations where English is not the first or primary language could provide opportunities for developing language skills while enhancing patience, cross-cultural communication, and problem-solving skills that could be beneficial personally and professionally.

This thesis examines the education and social inclusion and exclusion of young mothers, focusing on the experiences of sixteen pregnant young women and mothers attending a course of antenatal education during 2007. I use a critical feminist approach to examine the meanings of education in this setting alongside the young women's mothering identities. The thesis interrogates the effects of New Labour's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in relation to the young women in my study. I analyse how the concept of 'social exclusion' has cast the 'teenage mother' as responsible for reproducing a cycle of disadvantage, obscuring the socially including aspects of young motherhood. I argue that policy constructions of teenage motherhood are contradicted by the lived experience of the young mothers in my study. In defiance of discourses of the teenage mother as unfit mother, the young women construct themselves in many cases as ready for motherhood and as resilient adults who choose to 'take responsibility' for their actions, re-engage with education and want to 'do the best' for their children. I challenge the idea that 'interventions' such as this antenatal educational setting are part of a policy framework that seeks to teach 'middle-class' parenting methods to working-class young women. Rather, the professionals working in the setting transform policy discourses to support and defend the young women from stigma. I contrast the young women's positive experiences in the setting with their negative school experiences, and show how the process of educational disaffection often happens prior to pregnancy, and how pregnancy precipitates increased motivation. The young women use pregnancy as a way to transition from a 'bad girl' to a 'good mother' identity, and as an opportunity to re-evaluate family relationships and friendships. I conclude by making policy recommendations with regard to the education of pregnant young women and mothers.

Contrary to popular understandings of academia, the work of academics is intrinsically community driven, because scholarly inquiry is invariably about social life. Therefore, what occupies academic scholarship is in the interest of the broader populace, and we rely on the public to inform our work. The findings of academic work are simultaneously a reflection of the researcher, and the public. The research interests of contemporary cultural and social researchers inevitably, and often necessarily, reflect issues and activities that they encounter in their everyday lives...

The ideologies rampant in the societies ensure their reproduction through various means. Social institutions are employed to carry out the power structures and uphold the favourable ideologies. These ideologies always favour one over the other by means of differentiation. Gender is one such ideology/construct, which maintains the favourable hegemony of men over women by ascribing different gender roles that justify the society’s unequal treatment of men and women. Motherhood is the most natural aspect of female gender. However, society and social institutions are selective of what comprises good or bad mothering. I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen runs along the same line, where a mother is tormented by guilt of not fulfilling her role as a good mother. This study, thus, offers a critique on social stereotyping of gender roles from a social construction feminist perspective. The study specifically ventures to explore the various factors and institutions that normalize prescribed rules for good and bad mothering. The study also questions the unhelpful stance of the society with respect to child caring services, which makes women accept traditional gender roles. The aim of the study is to gain insight on social manipulation of gender as a way for upholding traditional gender values / roles.

Often presented as a means of communicating the latest in scientific research to parents, literacy advice is a key strategy used by educational institutions to address persistent gaps in literacy achievement across socio-economic groups. The rationale for creating and disseminating literacy advice is that if families adhere to it, their children will become literate, succeed in school, and become productive members of society. Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis, feminist theories, and the concept of mothering and literacy as situated practices, the study explores literacy advice to parents as a gendered practice of power rather than an institutional truth. Based on the analysis of over three hundred literacy advice texts published in Britain and North America since the Nineteenth Century, the study demonstrated that contemporary literacy advice to parents is deeply rooted in the cultural ideal of the “good mother.” Discourses of domestic pedagogy, intensive mothering, and the “normal” family normalize middle class domesticity and the ideal of the good mother as essential to children’s literacy acquisition and academic success. The findings suggest that reliance upon women’s domestic literacy work to promote children’s academic success not only reproduces gender inequalities, but has implications for equity in literacy learning opportunities among diversely situated children and families.

Aim/Purpose: Doctoral students’ experiences in PhD programs could be a journey of identity evolution. Existing research on doctoral students’ identities has typically been conducted by faculties. As the main character in the identity evolution process, it is critical to understand doctoral students’ interpretation of their own identities and identity development in PhD programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine how and what education doctoral students discovered when they used self-study and relevant qualitative methodologies (e.g., auto-ethnography) to investigate their identities and identity development through their own practices in PhD programs. Background: This research began as part of a larger project to synthesize studies on doctoral students’ identities. A cluster of articles was identified in which students were examining their experiences as developing individuals from the perspective of identities and identity development. In contrast to most of the previous research on doctoral education, this collection of articles was written by doctoral students as part of their academic and professional practice. Methodology: The larger qualitative systematic review (i.e., qualitative evidence synthesis) of doctoral students’ identity development began with database searches that were not restricted by year (e.g., PsycINFO, Education Research Complete, and Education Resources Information Center). Thirteen articles written by doctoral students discussing their identities and identity development in PhD programs were further identified from selected articles ranging from 2009 to 2021. These articles and their implications were analyzed using a qualitative research synthesis approach. Contribution: Although scholars have looked at doctoral students’ identities and identity development from various viewpoints, the current investigation deepens the understanding of this focus from doctoral students’ own perspectives. Doctoral students are trained investigators with research skills and mindsets. As novice researchers and educators, their open and honest reflections about their challenges, opportunities, and development are worthwhile to identify significant aspects of their identities and identity development in PhD programs. Findings: There are two dimensions to the findings: the Approach Dimension and the Content Dimension. The Approach Dimension is concerned with how doctoral students investigated their identities and identity development, whereas the Content Dimension is concerned with what they found. Findings in the Approach Dimension show that doctoral students applied the self-study inquiry approach or used the notion of self-study inquiry to interpret their identity and identity development. The self-study inquiry encompasses five main features, including (1) Self-Initiated and Focused, (2) Improvement-Aimed, (3) Collaborative/Interactive, (4) Reflective Data Collection, and (5) Exemplar-Based Validation. Doctoral students examined the five self-study features both directly and indirectly in their studies. The investigation revealed four major themes in the Content Dimension, including (1) Identity Development as a Dynamic Process, (2) Multiple Identities, (3) Learning Contexts, and (4) Socialization. Recommendations for Practitioners: The findings suggest that practitioners in PhD programs should be aware of the existence, process, and dynamics of identity evolution in doctoral programs. The best possible way for PhD program administrators, faculties, and advisors to support doctoral students’ growth and identity development is to incorporate doctoral students’ own insights into practice. Given the unprecedented influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the educational environment and the diversity of doctoral students, it is crucial to discover how doctoral students use structured research methods to reflect, learn, and self-support their identity development during their PhD programs. The self-study inquiry process would be a helpful and effective approach to support doctoral students’ advancement. For instance, PhD programs could create self-evaluation assignments or courses that incorporate both self-study and identity development concepts. Recommendation for Researchers: When studying doctoral students’ identity development, it is critical to emphasize the essence of identity, which is people’s perceptions of who they are. We recommend that researchers who study doctoral students could further integrate doctoral students’ insights about their own identity status (e.g., multiple identities) into research. Impact on Society: Successful completion of PhD programs is a critical foundation for doctoral students to serve society as expert researchers and educators. Support for the growth and development of doctoral students could facilitate the completion of their doctoral programs and strengthen their sense of agency through the lens of identity. Future Research: Future research could go beyond the field of education and expand to more disciplines to identify common and diverse factors influencing doctoral students’ identity and identity development across domains. Future research on the post-COVID-19 era and its implications for online programs must also be studied in connection with doctoral students’ identities and identity development.

Previous articleNext article No AccessPre-Modern and Modern Power: Foucault and the Case of Domestic ViolenceAndrea C. WestlundAndrea C. Westlund Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 24, Number 4Summer, 1999Institutions, Regulation, and Social Control Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495402 Views: 134Total views on this site Citations: 38Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Cenk Saraçoğlu, Danièle Bélanger Governance through discipline in the neighbourhood: Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens in urban life, The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 65, no.44 (Jul 2021): 463–475.https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12704Luyue Zhang, Shih-Ya Kuo, Tim Simpson Trapped and Resistant Body: Everyday Practices of Women in Taiwan in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence, Journal of Family Violence 36, no.66 (Aug 2020): 657–668.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-020-00192-yHawra Rabaan, Alyson L. 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This article takes South Korea (hereafter Korea) as the location of a proposed case study on migrant mothering in a neoliberal state . It attempts to elaborate how gendered nation-building initiatives deploy the concept of multiculturalism while selectively targeting female marriage migrants (FMMs), and how this very process reifies gender, ethnicity, and class inequity in everyday institutional practice. Guided by feminist scholars’ work on the feminization of migration and intensive mothering, and using ethnographic research as a method, this study examined the institutional reification of neoliberal multicultural policy . It explored how gendered neoliberal nation-building is translated into mundane practices at a multicultural family support center. Findings include that patriarchy and cultural paternalism pervaded both state policies and everyday practice by regulating service eligibility and constructing FMMs as victims in need of paternalistic supports. Meanwhile, migrant mothers remained under multiple levels of surveillance to receive services at multicultural family support centers and were pressured to perform ‘good mothering’ through a preoccupation with their children's language education. As a result, FMMs were otherized and inferiorized in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and social status while their multicultural children were constructed as social capitals to be invested in for Korea's economic future.

Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico is an in-depth examination of the ways in which the neoliberal Mexican state attempts to control women's reproductive practices and intervene in child-rearing and family relations through the cash transfer program known as Oportunidades (“Opportunities” in English). With more than a fifth of Mexico's population enrolled, Oportunidades uses access to monthly cash benefits for women and children to induce women to take responsibility for health, nutrition, and education in their families. The program requires women to attend informative pláticas and special events, to make sure their children go to school, and to take their children regularly to the doctor. In addition, women are often required to do physical labor such as sweeping health clinics, cleaning bathrooms in health clinics or schools, and other public maintenance work.Evoking a Foucauldian analysis of surveillance and biopower, anthropologist Vania Smith-Oka has produced a convincing ethnographic account of the ways in which teachers, doctors, nurses, and health workers systematically assume that Nahua indigenous women of Amatlán, Veracruz (a pseudonym), do not know how to be good mothers, routinely have too many children, and need to be repeatedly instructed in sound child-rearing and health practices. Smith-Oka frames the Oportunidades program as part of a continuum of state interventions, beginning with indigenismo in the 1920s, that seek to convert indigenous peoples into modern Mexicans who follow Western health, education, and family practices.The book makes a contribution to Mexican historiography of the state and its manifestation at the local level — particularly through gendered state practices. It seriously challenges the idea that Mexico is a poststate society in which government interventions are minimal. At the time I am writing this, the Mexican senate has just approved a major energy reform that will have long-lasting consequences in many indigenous communities. Engineered to provide private transnational companies access to subsoil resources such as natural gas and oil in indigenous territories, current legislation known informally as the energy reform is a major piece of government legislation that, like Oportunidades, will remake communities and lives.Smith-Oka uses the strengths of ethnography and participant observation to illustrate the major points of the book. She draws strong portraits of key women protagonists in her story and shows how they are affected by and also push back against the regimentation, reporting, and surveillance that come with participation in the Oportunidades program. Many of her insights come from long-term observation of women from Amatlán interacting with nurses, doctors, and other health practitioners at local clinics and hospitals.A particularly compelling section of the book describes a series of highly coercive practices whereby many women are sterilized or, if they are not, are constantly harangued at every medical appointment (whether related to reproductive health or not) to get “the operation” (p. 69). Reluctant husbands can also be intimidated as well. Smith-Oka describes one scene in which a woman came in with her husband and two children for a medical visit. She did not want “the operation” and requested an IUD. She was told her uterus was too big for the IUDs available. She was then asked if her husband used condoms. She said little, and the husband was ushered into the room, where, with his eyes facing down, he was instructed in condom use by a female doctor pulling one over her fingers. Such intimate ethnography goes a long way toward convincing readers of the fundamental lack of respect with which women and men are treated.Smith-Oka takes seriously trying to understand the point of view of doctors and nurses as well. She accurately concludes that the world from which health practitioners come and the kind of socialization they have by and large involves preconceived racist conceptualizations of how indigenous women think, what they respond to, and what they need. Her analysis suggests that those who design and implement development programs for the Mexican state such as Oportunidades continue to begin from a paternalistic viewpoint with regard to how they frame and engage with indigenous peoples. Indigenous women are seen as needing strong guidance and intervention in order to improve their lives. While the rhetoric of cash transfer programs like Oportunidades is often about participation and women's empowerment, Smith-Oka's ethnography suggests the opposite.The book also contributes to a larger conversation about how good and bad mothering have been defined historically and contemporarily not only in Mexico but also in other parts of the world. I was hoping that Smith-Oka would spend more time discussing her findings in relation to the rich literature on women's history and the state in Mexico as well as Mexican women's responses to state interventions. This book will be of most interest to those teaching women and gender studies, Mexican history and society, public health studies, and medical and cultural anthropology.

The study of the general educational strategy of students improves the efficiency of the entire training system. Such studies facilitate the organization of the educational process for students, enable the younger generation to more quickly adapt to the labor market. Today, domestic science feels the inadequacy of such research, and this in turn affects the system of higher education in Kazakhstan. Limited information about the educational strategies of Kazakhstan students awakens interest in conducting a holistic study of this problem. The article provides an analysis of the empirical research, opportunities for young people in the field of education, shows the system problems of higher educational institutions in Kazakhstan, the formation of specific organizational solutions, as well as directions in solving these problems. The purpose of the article is to identify strategies by identifying the motives of students in Kazakhstani universities. The research question of the article was as follows: What are the reasons for the educational choice of modern youth? What is the role of the current education system in meeting the educational strategies of students in higher education? What are the students' plans in education and science? Data collection was carried out using a complex of quantitative and qualitative methods. In the first case, a questionnaire was used (1200 questionnaires), in which students, undergraduates and doctoral students from national and state universities of Kazakhstan participated. In-depth interviews and focus group research was conducted among undergraduates and doctoral students. In the general section of the sample, the respondents were distributed as follows: students - 60%, undergraduates - 30%, doctoral students - 10%. This proportion reflects the characteristics of the general population of this social group. The survey was conducted in large universities (LN Gumilyov ENU, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, KNTU named after KI Satpayev, KarSU named after academician E. Buketov) in three major cities of Kazakhstan (Astana, Almaty, Karaganda ). These cities provide thousands of young people with the opportunity to receive education and achieve their life goals. These quantitative research results were processed in the SPSS computer program and analyzed. The theoretical and practical importance of the article lies in the elaborated statements that contribute to the further development and enrichment of data in the field of the sociology of science, the sociology of education, educational and scientific programs, educational concepts. As a result of the study, the authors show types that are characterized by different motives and performance of each social group of young people, as well as the influence of a complex of factors of different levels of educational strategies. The integrated use of quantitative and qualitative methods in the collection of empirical information will help to obtain complete information for determining the educational and scientific strategies of the youth of modern Kazakhstan. Keywords: educational strategies, student youth, higher education, motivation

Bodies of Data challenges the promise of big data in knowing and organizing people by explicating how data are made and theorizing mismatches between actors, data, and institutions. Situated at a large public university in the United States that hosts approximately 30,000 undergraduate students, this research ethnographically traces the development and deployment of an app for student success that draws from traditional (demographic information, enrollment history, grade distributions) and non-traditional (WiFi network usage, card swipes, learning management systems) student data to anticipate the likelihood of graduation in a four-year period. The app, which offers an interface for students based on nudging, is the product of collaborations between actors who specialize in educational technology. As these actors manage the app, they must also interpret data against the students who generate those data, many of whom do not neatly mirror their data counterparts. The central question animating this research asks how the designers of the app create order—whether through material bodies that are knowable to data collection or reorganized demographic groupings—as they render students into data.To address this question and investigate practices of making data, I conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, using participant observation and interviewing with university administrators, data scientists, app developers, and undergraduate students. Through a theoretical approach informed by anthropology, science and technology studies, critical data studies, and feminist theory, I analyze how data and the institution make each other through the modeling of student bodies and reshaping of subjectivity. I leverage technical glitches—slippages between students and their data—and failure at large at the institution as analytics to both expose otherwise hidden processes of ordering and productively read failure as an opportunity for imagining what data could do. Predictive projects that derive from big data are increasingly common in higher education as institutions look to data to understand populations. Bodies of Data empirically provides evidence regarding how data are made through sociotechnical processes, in which data are not for understanding but for ordering. As universities look to big data to inform decision-making, the findings of this research contradict assumptions that data provide neutral and objective ways of knowing students.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

The Philippines is a global leader in deploying microcredit to address poverty. These programmes are usually directed at women. Research on these programmes focuses on traditional economic indicators such as loan repayment rates but neglects impacts on women’s agency and well-being, or their position in the household and relationships with their partners and children. It is taken for granted that access to microcredit leads to enhanced gender freedoms. In line with the growing body of work in feminist scholarship that critiques the instrumentalist logic of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in relation to women, this research foregrounds stories from interviews with female borrowers in Zamboanga City in Southern Philippines to provide grounded illustrations of how microcredit is reshaping relationships between women and their families, women and poverty and women and the state. Borrowers used loans to meet their family’s needs even at the cost of harassment from creditors, indebtedness, increased workloads and conflict with partners. These narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal discourse of female empowerment through access to credit by exposing how microcredit is part of a complex set of regulations around ‘good motherhood’ and consumption, where women’s moral worth is based on their willingness and ability to lift their families out of poverty.

Early motherhood and caring for the infant involve a moral ambiguity that is related to the questions of responsibility and vulnerability. By means of the ethics of care, motherhood can be understood as belonging to the moral domain, as relational, and as linked with everyday social situations. The culturally dominant narratives of ‘good mothering’ easily naturalise and normatise maternal agency. This study illustrates the process of adopting responsibility for the infant and the moral ambivalence that is inscribed in early maternal care. The data consist of four interview sessions with each of seven first-time mothers conducted during pregnancy and the first post-natal year. The interviews concentrated on events, relationships, routines, thoughts and feelings related to the mothers’ daily caring for the baby. The women talked about their experiences drawing on two different narratives. The narrative of desirable responsibility unfolded the positive aspects of caring and responsibility for the baby. By means of this narrative, the women were able to give coherence to their lives as new mothers and to narrate the pleasure they felt in taking responsibility for their baby. In contrast, the narrative of maternal vulnerability showed the shadow side of maternal care focusing on the mothers’ tiredness and distress. This narrative embodied ‘moral monitoring’ and ‘epistemological struggles’ between the dominant cultural narratives and the mothers’ personal narratives. The study shows that early mothering is morally laden in two different ways simultaneously. Mothering itself is a moral disposition and practice characterised by ambivalence. The cultural narratives of ‘good mothering’ play a dual role in this process: they tempt women into pursuing intensive mothering, but at the same time they create an elusive moral imperative.