Abstract
There is a lot to like in Bahiyyah M. Muhammad and Mélanie-Angela Neuilly’s new collection, Mothering from the Field: The Impact of Motherhood on Site-based Research. It is an ambitious book, with 17 chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion written by the coeditors. Twenty-five authors contributed to the volume; many of the authors are partners of each other, and there is even a parent–child–aunt–niece–nephew kinship contribution, which is novel and inviting. The range of disciplines and perspectives included is impressive as well: the authors included a nine-year-old student, a retired kindergarten teacher, sociologists, criminologists and anthropologists, a medical doctor, videographer, geneticist, and other assorted careers outside of academe. The field sites of the authors stretch from Africa to Asia to the Americas, and the essays are in turn serious, light-hearted, tragic, and contemplative.
The strength of the volume rests in the introductory chapters that lay out the difficulties of bringing family life into the academy. The first chapter by Kelly Ward, Lisa Wolf-Wendel, and Lindsey Marco carefully details what has changed for women engaged in STEM and field-based research fields over the past couple of decades, while lamenting how static the academy remains as far as understanding the realities of biological reproduction in the context of social and intellectual production. It is not only the invisibility of women in various fields (and, as noted, Black, brown, Asian, and Indigenous women in particular) but the stubborn entrenchment of quantitative measures of productivity and success that further divorces the production of academic commodities and products for delivery from the kinship that allows for the generation of academic fields and scholarly ideas in the first place.
Many of the essays in the volume touch on the core theme of lack: the lack of support, either by committee members, colleagues, the institution, or granting agencies on one end, or by family and friends on the other. Layered throughout is the frustration of feeling alone, or doing the PhD or research “the wrong way”; this is leavened by moments of the joy of being a parent in the field. The way children are an understood, expected, and appreciated aspect of our common humanity in cross-cultural encounters. As Deirdre Guthrie beautifully expresses in her essay, “Birthing the Social Scientist as Mother,” “[m]othering is among the most challenging and rewarding calls because one must expand to become better than she is. The gift is in the stretching. For those of us who conduct social science work in the field, in setting where we engage and seek meaning in particular human problems, processes, or practices, such stretching beyond the self means acknowledging that the way we occupy these lived spaces matter [author’s emphasis]” (p. 225).
The writing style in the book is lovely. The essays are accessible, clearly written, chatty, and quite personal in tone. The editors did a masterful job of pulling together a collection of varied and diverse voices into a coherent narrative. One critique would be that the volume assumes that parenting in the field involves nondisabled children or family members, but this lacuna is not the fault of the editors or authors alone. The main concern with this book is the intended audience. It is difficult to see how this book will be of use in any undergraduate seminar or class outside of a narrow focus on “the family” or as a section in a field methods class. The book may offer cold comfort to graduate students or child-rearing researchers who have similar experiences, thus helping them feel less alone in their struggles, but exasperated by the knowledge of how widespread these struggles are, and how little institutions seem to be willing to help. Students and researchers who have been paying attention to the inability of the academy to integrate reproduction with production will read the book as confirmation, as documentation of what they know to be true. The people who really need to read this book are the review boards and executive committees for federal grants and fellowships, administrators across higher education, and politicians. Otherwise, these essays will merely serve as beautiful and heartfelt testimonials to a heartless system in which parents, and particularly mothers, bear the costs of reproducing the society we need.