PhD mothers frequently find themselves under-represented, a reality reflected in social media posts, literature and academic discourse concerning their experiences. The prevalent narrative revolves around the challenges of reconciling or juggling their academic pursuits with mothering, a phenomenon observed globally across various disciplines. Unfortunately, mothering is often seen as disrupting the PhD progress due to issues such as pregnancy, maternity leave and post-maternity adjustments. Lives of mothers with older or disabled children are also often disrupted by mundane daily demands and unexpected emergencies, preventing them from adhering to schedules determined by the institutes. These disruptions frequently result in delayed completion of doctoral programmes, diminished productivity perceptions and even premature exits from academia. However, framing mothering and parenting merely as disruptions does not align neatly with our experiences of undertaking research as mothers.

‘… our mothering and being doctoral students are entangled. PhD mothers can face a lack of support and understanding from peers and supervisors, challenges relating to our changing, sometimes failing bodies, and time pressures and stress due to competing priorities. However, mothering can bring additional knowledge and skills, leading to different insights in and about research.’

Mothers in academia

We are three PhD candidates focusing on different aspects of education in Switzerland, Sweden and the UK. Our paths crossed through our emerging interest in new materialist, posthumanist thinking. We each seek to forge a way in research that recognises our lived experiences as mothers, to re-imagine research/ers in a way that recognises how mothering ‘intra-acts’ with institutions, policies and practices and how PhD mums come into being in a ‘spacetimemattering’ (Barad, 2007). We decided to enact our ideas further through a symposium at BERA’s 2023 annual conference, where we hoped to draw attention to ‘mothers in academia’ to heads of departments, directors of research studies, supervisors, teachers and peers. We continue this aim within this blog post.

When researching and mothering intra-act

Our lives are entangled with PhD research in rich, relational ways as mums, wives, humans to our animals, daughters, sisters, friends, neighbours, educators and students. Outside formal mentoring and supervisory relationships, we work together first and foremost as friends, in a tight, loving and supportive relationship enacted through WhatsApp conversations, Zoom calls and shared documents living ‘in the cloud’; writing as thinking in a collaborative ‘possibility space’. Experimental texts alongside creative outputs, such as the collage below, emerge and these enact and communicate our values of love, care and multiplicity.

Becoming mother-researcher. Collaboratively created, emerging from and through our discussions about this blog.

Embracing uncertainty – emergence from the ‘in-between’

In our symposium we dared to centre relationality and allowed for something new to emerge from the ‘in-between’, embracing uncertainty within a cloak of care for each other. Although we gave three individual presentations, we worked as an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013), an uncontainable multiplicity, entangled, where our relational, mothering, caring, thinking, writing, vulnerable selves are stable for just long enough for us to expand a space where objectivity, linearity, rationality and causality have long been championed as the only gold standard. Together with those who joined us, we embraced becoming-mother, resisting, creating space for difference to emerge.

PhD mums and mother-scholars are not a rarity in academia. Similar to Sylvia Plath’s (1960) Mushrooms, there are so many of us. Yet, instead of mothering, researching, connecting and worlding together, we are often required to direct our efforts to conform to neoliberal expectations, stepping into the academic space as self-sufficient, independent individuals who are beholden to no one, leaving mothering at the gate. We are all nudgers and shovers, yet we heave obstacles, widen crannies, shoulder through holes alone. The symposium was instigated by the three of us, who, unlike Plath’s mushrooms, no longer want to be meek and voiceless. But it was those who attended the symposium, and their unmistakeable desire to connect, that infused the event with the vitality we experienced. New connections were made through and beyond the stories and ideas we told that were told to us by those attending our symposium. Tendrils unfurling, multiplying, shifting outwards. We become ‘space invaders’ engaging with different temporalities, voices, languages, affects, bodies, intensities and mothers’ knowledge. Like a group of the sirens, we belted out a song, comforting to some, discomfiting to others.

The possibilities when research is entangled with mothering

Barad (2007) posits that time has a thickness in which the past, present and future are knitted into every moment. Similarly, we argue that our mothering and being doctoral students are entangled. PhD mums can face a lack of support and understanding from peers and supervisors, challenges relating to our changing, sometimes failing bodies, and time pressures and stress due to competing priorities. However, mothering can bring additional knowledge and skills, leading to different insights in and about research. Since experiences can differ from cohort to country, we hope here to contribute to the discussion with our own international perspectives and call for further research exploring (m)other perspectives in doctoral education.

*Authors are ordered alphabetically, as contribution is unquantifiable

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic.