Episode 133 - Mothering in the Academy: Dangerous, Shameful, and Common Place: Lakisha Lockhart, Sarah Farmer, and Ekaterina Lomperis
Dialogue on Teaching, Wabash Center’s podcast series, is hosted by Nancy Lynne Westfield, Ph.D., Director of the Wabash Center. Amplifying the Wabash Center’s mission, the podcasts focus upon issues of teaching and learning in theology and religion within colleges, university, seminaries, as well as the publics impacted by these schools. Dialogues with faculty and administrators working in the wide range of institutional contexts illumine the complexity of teaching and the teaching life.
The measures of scholarly productivity are often premised upon a life without the distractions of children and family. The challenges of tenure and promotion are amplified for young parents, yet schools seldom support new mothers with policies, procedures, and cultural norms of welcoming and belonging. Too many schools punish, shame, or blame women who choose to parent. This conversation with young theologians raises the problem of living integrated, whole lives as generative women in the academy. What are alternative institutional practices which would affirm, nurture, and strengthen young mothers who are dedicated to scholarship and a life of teaching in the academy? What if the life of the mind included pregnant women, nursing women, and mothers of infants and toddlers?