Seminar Series: Abstract

Maternal feminism in the field: moving forward with a little data and a lot of experience
Kelly Dombroski, PhD Candidate, Department of Human Geography

In this seminar I reflect on how the rich experience of maternal feminist fieldwork with a child in the field changed my PhD thesis direction and led to greater experimentation with alternative qualitative methodologies. In 2007, I conducted fieldwork amongst Hui, Han and Tibetan mothers of the ancient silk-road city of Xining, China. Despite historically being a regional centre of trade and culture, these days Xining is something of an ‘out of the way’ place, its modernity labelled ‘backward’ and its traditions labelled ‘feudal’. Influenced by maternal feminism and post-development approaches, I attempted to challenge these dismissive labels by mapping the economic diversity of mothers’ work particularly amongst the Hui people. However, being a mother in the field was both bane and boon: the richness of experiencing alternative mothering spaces and practices contrasted with difficulties in collecting mothers’ life-history narratives and the specifics of their economic activities. In this seminar I will present some preliminary findings on mothers’ economic work in Xining, reflect on the ways my somewhat difficult field experience helped me to innovate in my research design and methodology, then outline my plans for an upcoming return visit where I will focus on the economic significance of practices and spaces of mothering using visual, narrative, and autoethnographic methodologies.