Motherhood’s Lonely States

Motherhood’s Lonely States is the third event in our series of The English Association’s special interest group on Loneliness and Technology.

Motherhood is a paradoxical state: mothers are hugely in demand, and often rarely have time for themselves – the time of motherhood to borrow the title of Lisa Baraitser’s work is that of constant interruption; or indeed we might say of the capitalist clock as social reproduction has intensified in the present. Motherhood is more than ever, in spite, or because, of the double day and the increasing incursion of technology on everyday life – constant, wearing, precarious work. And yet, motherhood can also be an intensely lonely state – not only in its middle-class suburban isolation but also, as second-wave feminists saw, because women work, and mother’s ambivalence is erased from conversations about motherhood. Mothers are, then, often considered, one of loneliness’s prime subjects. What is required to fully address this question of motherhood and loneliness and what might it tell us about the question of care today? Does technology aid or abate this feeling of loneliness? And how might we design education, care, material and digital technologies with these questions in mind?

In this event Professor Lisa Baraitser, Dr Helen McCarthy and Dr Harriet Barratt will be discussing the work of motherhood today, the question of care and the technological objects that intensify and transform the mother-child relationship.

Speaker bios

Professor Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She works on time, care and gender, and is the author of the award-winning monograph Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017). She is currently co-Principal Investigator on an interdisciplinary research project on the relation between time and healthcare called Waiting Times, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She is the co-editor of the open access journal Studies in the Maternal, and co-founder of the research network MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics). She is a psychoanalyst in practice in London, and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Dr Harriet Barratt is Senior Research Associate at York St. John University, running a co-produced project evaluating the impact of Converge, a programme which offers people with mental health issues free access to university education. Her research interests span the critical medical humanities, literature, psychoanalysis, material culture, public health and social policy, and interdisciplinary methodologies (particularly around narratives of material and sensory experience). She is part of the Wellcome-funded collective ‘Senses of Modern Health/care Environments‘, a regular oral history volunteer (particularly with the project NHS at 70/NHS: Voices of COVID), and a member of the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust’s Onward Arts Group.

Dr Helen McCarthy is Reader in Modern and Contemporary British History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of three books, most recently Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury Books, 2020).

Loneliness and Technology

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them.

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It’s designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation.

The aim of the project is to investigate how a range of fields, as they struggle to adapt to the digital, depend on literary elements to convert feelings of isolation into more productive forms of solitude and loneliness. The intention is to provide a forum to think about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.

It is designed as a cross-sector and interdisciplinary project that seeks to draw on expertise in the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, digital humanities, mental health, architecture and the history of work and education to bring together researchers and prompt discussion around how we relate to the digital and what it’s possible to do with thinking and feeling.

Anyone interested in joining the group or who’d like more information about it is invited to contact Dr Jess Cotton.