Daughters - mothers: on the question of the research of (teen) motherhood

Nadya Nartova (Dalglish Visiting Research Fellow in CEES)

5.30pm, CEES Seminar Room, 8 Lilybank Gardens

Motherhood is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon in contemporary culture: it is seen as problematic in everyday life and in academic research. As a routinized and naturalized practice, motherhood is a rigid normalizing institution that regulates not only experience, but also the strategy of speaking and presentation. The "frontier" of the motherhood space is of particular interest, for example, teenage mothers. On the one hand, they are marginalized; on the other hand, they exist under strict control by the public and professionals. They often have to demonstrate more competence in motherhood / maternal care than is required from women of "legitimate" child-bearing age. Therefore, questions arise: how is the experience of teenage motherhood organized and presented? What are the possible theoretical approaches to the understanding of maternity as a whole?

I will discuss the first results, and possible vectors of analysis of teenage mothers’ experience. This presentation is based on 30 interviews with women who gave birth under 18 years of age and who are in the stage of "transition to motherhood" (the children were no more than 5 years at the time of interview). The interviews were collected in 2009 and 2011 in two Russian cities: St. Petersburg (20 interviews) and Ulyanovsk (10 interviews).

All welcome.

The CEES Seminar Series is supported by the MacFie Bequest, named after Professor Alec MacFie, Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University from 1945 to 1958. 

Enquiries: Ammon.Cheskin@glasgow.ac.uk, +44 (0)141 330 2845/5585

First published: 13 September 2012

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