Spaces and Politics of Motherhood

Kate Boyer is a Senior Lecturer of Human Geography in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University in the UK. She received her PhD in Human Geography in 2001from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and over the last ten years has written extensively about issues of motherhood, politics and space. She has published this research in journals such as: Progress in Human Geography; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Gender, Place and Culture; Social and Cultural Geography and Feminist Theory. She has also shared her work with infant-feeding practitioners and policy-makers through the auspices of a bridge-building seminar series funded by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council) which ran over 2015 and 2016 (with Drs. Sally Dowling and David Pontin). In 2016 she presented her research to the UK Houses of Parliament through the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infant Feeding and Inequality; and her work has also been noted in the Welsh National Assembly. Born in the US and having lived in both the US and Canada, she currently lives in Bristol with her partner and school-age son.

• Introduction/ 1. Maternal Becomings: space, time and identity in early motherhood/ 2. Motherhood, Space and Politics with the World: spatial practice and material agency in maternal becomings (with Justin Spinney) /3. Agentic Breastmilk: distributed agencies of infant feeding/ 4. Breastfeeding in Public: affect, public comfort and the agency of strangers/ 5. Mothers Acting Back: claiming space through lactation advocacy ('lactivism')/6. Combining Care-work with Wage work: a consideration of the changing policy landscape/ Conclusion/ Bibliography/Index

Spaces and Politics of Motherhood is an important contribution to geography and to feminist studies of motherhood. By bringing together empirical insights into the ways that space(s) matter to the experiences of mothering, with theoretical analysis from New Materialisms and attention to policy, Boyer offers us an innovative and potentially far-reaching addition to this burgeoning area of research.