Guest editorial: Motherhood, work and the politics of care

• Date: 13 June 2024
• Pages: 757-763
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-06-2024-428
• Published date: 13 June 2024
• Author: Isabella Krysa,Mariana Ines Paludi,Liela Jamjoom,Marke Kivijärvi

Guest editorial: Motherhood, work

and the politics of care

Motherhood for me means loving someone more than myself, for the first time in my life - Isabella

Motherhood means energy, passion, pain and joy, all together - Mariana

Motherhood is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of who I was, who I am, and who

I want to be. - Liela

Motherhood is a journey full of emotions where ultimately, it is all the little things that matter the

most - Marke

Background

The idea for this special issue was born out of various conversations and projects between the

four of us over the years. We met more than a decade ago at Saint Mary’s University, in

Halifax, Canada, when most of us were childless, some of us still in the early beginnings of our

Ph.D. programs. Over the years, all of us ended up creating families with one, two and three

children, all of similar ages. Life happened, and we ended up on very different paths and in

different corners around the world (Finland, Saudi Arabia, Chile and Canada). Over the course

of time, we kept in touch, meeting at conferences, writing papers together and working on

various projects. What came out of our conversations was how profoundly our experiences as

mothers shaped our lives and how our work as academics was impacted by the various socio-

cultural backgrounds and different life situations we found ourselves in. It was fascinating to

exchange experiences and interpretations of motherhood in our various contexts, as well as

find differences and, at the same time, commonalities. On our own and during our encounters

collectively, we tried to make sense of our experiences, comparing, contrasting and drawing

on the various bodies of knowledge to come to understand how life happens to us as mothers,

working academics and members of our respective societies.

Motherhood provided us with a unique opportunity to delve into rethinking conceptual

dichotomies, such as “messy”maternal experiences versus neat academic lives (Huopalainen

and Satama, 2019), public versus private ways of mothering and rational thinking bodies

versus emotionalreproducing ones (Gatrell, 2013).We found ourselves conversing about how

we wanted to mother and present ourselves as academics, exchanged experiences on

contextual differences to child rearing and paused on the cultural differences in mothering.

Stories of individualistic versus collective forms of mothering,degrees of familial supportand

the intrusion or overlap of our academic lives with our familial ones emerged. These

discussions brought up how different our opportunities to organize care forour children were

and how our academic identities were shaped by care-giving. We were making sense of our

motherhood experiences through its multiplicity, complexity andbeauty. We were connected

by an experience so profound, and yet, we found ourselves being enthralled by the cultural

nuances of our experiences. Our lines of questioning drove some of us to write and publish

papers on motherhood discussing the societal and organizational othering practices women

experience as they become mothers (Krysa and Kivij€

arvi, 2022), the impact of the COVID-19

pandemic on working mothers in organizations (Paludi et al., 2023) and the overlooked

economic value of motherhood, which pushes mothers away from economic discourses on

development,production andrecovery (Jamjoom, 2022). We wantedto hear more stories, and so

we embarkedon this journey of inviting other mothersand scholars examining thesethemes to

describeexperiences of motherhoodat the intersection of work, care and socio-cultural context.

Equality,

Diversity and

Inclusion: An

International

Journal

757

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 43 No. 5, 2024

pp. 757-763

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-06-2024-428