Gender and Education

Solidarity & Beyond: Academic Motherhood, Care, and Collective Futures

This Special Issue brings together international, intersectional feminist scholarship examining academic motherhood, care, and solidarity within gendered education systems.

The conceptual framings within this Call for Papers engage with feminist, queer, non-binary perspectives embedded in critical, creative and cultural methodologies. The issue responds to ongoing debates within Gender and Education concerning lived experience, structural inequality, and knowledge production. The distinctive contribution of this CFP lies in its gender-fluid reconceptualization of motherhood. Rather than treating motherhood as synonymous with femaleness or biological maternity, we approach it as a relational, affective, and political practice of care that is not inherently or exclusively tied to women’s bodies. This framing unsettles long-standing feminist and institutional assumptions that position motherhood as a “women’s issue” enabling more expansive analyses of care, responsibility, and solidarity within academia.

Academic motherhood is often positioned as an individualised challenge. This Special Issue aims to conceptualise it as a structural and relational condition. It further complicates these framings by acknowledging ambivalence, contradiction, and the political economy of care, drawing on intersectional feminist scholarship in alignment with feminist philosophies of motherhood. A central contribution is the positioning of solidarity as political and pedagogical practice within academia while simultaneously positing motherhood as non-gendered affective and emotional practice. The special issue also seeks engagement with diverse aspects of gender, cultural, and queer theories, particularly in relation to how these imaginaries reconfigure feminist debates on embodiment, affect, and relationality. It foregrounds intersections including race, class, Indigeneity, migration, sexuality, and gender identity, and disability.

By decoupling motherhood from fixed gender identities, the special issue creates conceptual space to engage queer, non-binary, trans, and gender-diverse experiences, as well as diverse parenting and caregiving formations that exceed normative maternal scripts. This approach allows motherhood to be examined not only as an identity but as a structuring condition of academic life, shaped by power, precarity, and the political economy of care. It is this non-normative, gender-fluid framing of motherhood, and its implications for rethinking care, knowledge production, and solidarity in higher education that constitutes the central and innovative contribution of this issue within the wider field of gender and education.

Contributions exploring academic motherhood, care, and solidarity across educational contexts are warmly invited. We particularly encourage work that critically engages with notions of solidarity, allyship, care and gender-fluid understandings and conceptualisations of motherhood. We explicitly welcome submissions that extend beyond normative framings of motherhood. This includes diverse parenting formations, non-cis and queer perspectives, and analyses of how institutions regulate gender, sexuality, and care.