Projects
Home : Narratives of Confinement
FCC-MTL responds to the impacts of confinement on mothers during Covid.
Women, particularly of colour, bear the brunt of unpaid care of children, the elderly and the household while many also maintain waged work. Women have led the effort at the frontline, but suffer 50% more job losses, and as reopening occurs, are more likely to stay home. Domestic violence against women has also increased. Covid has exacerbated pre-existing gender inequality but confinement limits women’s access to their communities of support. FCC-MTL addresses and documents the toll on mothers through storytelling workshops. Family Care Collective Montreal (FCC-MTL) is a nascent community organization with a focus on advocacy, community support and access to resources and information. We have been providing informal social and practical support to new and expectant families, particularly from marginalized communities. Using letter-writing workshops, we will explore the experience of extra burdens placed on mothers during the pandemic – in terms of care work for children, elderly and sick people; homeschooling; emotional strain in couple relationships linked to confinement, division of labour, domestic abuse; stress from the threat or reality of joblessness; economic precarity. Sharing experiences through letter-writing has proven to be greatly therapeutic and offer perspective.
Narratives of Motherhood
A research project conducted with researchers at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, in partnership with the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital, that explores how women engage with various discourses of motherhood on the internet and in scientific and health literature. We are interested in women's interpretations of the latest neuroscience and epigenetics formulations of pregnancy and the postpartum period, and in how women relate to portrayals of motherhood in social media platforms such as Instagram.
The Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, is a network of scholars and clinicians who focus their research and training on topics of social and cultural psychology. These themes include global mental health, social determinants of mental health, immigrant and refugee mental health, and the diversity in mental health care.
"Mombrain and Sticky DNA": The Impacts of Neurobiological and Epigenetic Framings of Motherhood on Women's Subjectivities https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33928142/