‘Faithful’ Mothers and the Politics of Nurturing Future Secular Citizens

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Project overview

Mothering remains highly understudied, particularly in relation to non-mainstream models of mothering. In a world ridden with inter-communal conflict, this fellowship will build a body of scholarship and a research network to explore the significant but unrecognised roles that mothers play in the formation of citizens and state-building, during and beyond times of conflict. By exploring how mothers navigate everyday faith and the pushes and pulls of the largely secular contemporary state, this project will forefront their socio-political agency, reinstating them as influential actors and not just victims of conflict. In a cutting-edge move, the project brings together mothering practices among minority faiths from the global south, to reflect on their analytical, social and political relevance for diasporic communities in the global north, thereby laying the ground for future, expansible collaborative engagements around fathering and non-normative parenting.

Project objectives

This fellowship will allow Professor Rowena Robinson and Professor Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor focused time to work together to pool their knowledge and networks to:

1. break new scholarly ground in religious studies, feminism and sociology and anthropology;
2. to develop ethical and co-produced methods to address these issues in ways that are culturally-sensitive and which recognise the hierarchies (for example between the global north and south or arising from the colonial legacy) that underpin all research and
3. to revitalize mothering and religion as a field of study.

Impact statement

For the two scholars involved, they come to the project from different starting points but similar interests and questions. Professor Robinson’s work on south Asia has sensitized her to the absence of research on nonmajority, non-mainstream models of mothering and the fact that contemporary mothering needs to be understood through the complex interconnections in social life of gender, everyday faith and religion as well as modern technologies, the state, ideas of secularity and engagements with other religious communities and world-views.

The focus on diversity and the critical need to transcend and think about borders and boundaries differently bring together her preoccupations with those of her host, Professor Cheruvallil-Contractor. Professor Cheruvallil-Contractor’s work is also deeply embedded in questions of the modern, of inter-community relationships and lived experiences of mothers and children. She is particularly concerned about the absence of questions of mothering in political discourses and in reclaiming mothering from patriarchal religious texts. Together, Robinson and Cheruvallil-Contractor seek to think of mothering, fathering and non-traditional parenting in terms of the new possibilities of soft power and care work for radically critiquing modern political economy and neoliberal ideologies.

Moreover, mothering and religion is under-researched. We argue for integrating sociology, anthropology and political science in such research to think about mothering and religion both from the micro-perspective in everyday life as well as from the macro-perspective of how relationships of mothering and parenting affect and influence interactions with other communities, with the state, with institutions within civil society and the like.
The collaboration will raise the profile of the visiting scholar in this novel area of research, even as it simultaneously increases the visibility of the research domain itself and helps to launch it as a new scholarly enterprise.

Outputs

During the three months that Professor Robinson is in Coventry, she and Cheruvallil-Contractor will work towards (1) an edited volume on mother religion and the state; (2) building a network of scholars; and (3) engage in conversations with key thinkers and religious actors; and (4) seed planning for future conferences; grant applications and finally (5) deliberate upon how to extend the work on mothering and religion to take into account fathering and non-traditional forms of parenting.

A symposium will bring together scholars who are interested in these themes in relation to religion and mothering in the context of inter-community relationships, conflicts and diversity. It will explore separately and in connection mothering, fathering and non-traditional parenting and will develop working groups to delve into these issues more closely. The symposium and working groups will also involve non-academic partners to reflect on arts-based approaches and how the visual may be used to represent and rethink these complicated relationships in an accessible and aesthetic manner. This process may seed further projects around co-creating multi-media exhibits/interactions with scholars, learners and artists.

The proposal takes advantage of the potential for working together in a sustained, face-to-face collaboration made possible once again in post-pandemic times. In a ground-breaking exercise, the scholars propose to map out the terrain of this new area of research and chart its possibilities for seeding future collaborations, applications, conferences and working groups.

Particular to the project are the potential of slow thinking, and engaged and sustained conversation and reflection in order to tease out the myriad implications and promises of this novel and critical area of research. The scholars wish to move away from abstractions and to draw into the network those who similarly seek a grounded and granular engagement with mothering, everyday faith and politics, as well as moving towards the inter-connected and broadened themes of fathering and atypical parenting from the perspective of religion, modernity and secularity.