Hosted by the University of Bolton School of Arts and Creative Technologies.

This interdisciplinary online conference, featuring keynote speaker Dr Andrea O’Reilly (York University, Toronto), aims to address spaces of academic enquiry from which the figure of the mother has, historically speaking, been missing. Dr. O’Reilly’s own work on matricentric feminism notes the neglect of the mother in academic feminism. This conference comes out of an investigation into canonical academic feminism; similarly, art history as a scholarly discipline has largely excluded maternal art, resulting in a tradition of critique in which representations of maternity have existed in an occluded space - a forced instance of feminist separatism. This conference is invested, then, in exploring ‘the missing mother’ in these, and other, disciplines. We are interested, as Dr. O’Reilly suggests, in feminism(s) both on and of maternity; in considerations of the social, psychic and symbolic order of the mother; in activism; in social and political manifestations of motherhood, the mother, mothering and the maternal. We acknowledge and value the manifold and invaluable contributions to this field of the professional and scholarly communities involved in midwifery and medical discourses; for the purposes of this conference, however, we would like to hear from those disciplines from which the maternal has been historically absent.

The Event Web Site : https://themissingmother.wordpress.com/