MotherNet News

Call for Papers

MotherNet colleague Loïc Bourdeau is co-organizing a hybrid conference Post-pandemic future: cultural meeting points on October 5-6 2023. The deadline for abstract submission is March 22, 2023. More information here >> 

Upcoming events

On March 23-26, 2023 MotherNet members Ieva Balčiūnė, Valerie Heffernan, Dovilė Kuzminskaitė, and Rūta Šlapkauskaitė will participate at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 54th Annual Convention at the Niagara Falls Convention Center. The 2023 NeMLA conference theme is RESILIENCE, an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma, counter ableism, redress social and racial marginalization, environmental destruction, and how we celebrate bodily, cognitive, and neurological difference, access silenced voices, recover from the pandemic, and struggle to save the humanities, and humanity itself from the maw of neoliberalism. 

On 19-21 June 2023 the third MotherNet summer school will take place in Vilnius university. This summer school will focus on research dissemination, including identifying dissemination opportunities; making effective presentations; and writing for publication. The programme will be specified in due course but time will be allocated for:

• Enhancing the work in research clusters
• Meetings between mentors and mentees
• ESR session to work on Postgraduate Symposium

Highlights

We are delighted to report the following research achievements of the MotherNet members

• The Early-Stage Researcher from Vilnius University, Ieva Balčiūnė, successfully defended her PhD thesis on Abandonment of Children in Soviet Lithuania: Parents, Unwanted Children and the State 

• MotherNet members have published the following articles:

• Atėnė Mendelytė. (2023). Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games' Amnesia: Rebirth. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231153715 
• Dagnė Beržaitė. (2023). Проблема представления материнства в русской литературе XIX века. Slavvaria, 1/2022(1/2022), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.15170/SV.1/2022.85
• Inga Hilbig. (2022). "Zwei Sprachen gleichzeitig? Nein, das schaff' ich nicht": A Lithuanian-German Boy's Journey to Active Bilingualism. Philologia Estonica Tallinnensis, 2022 (7), 126–147. https://doi.org/10.22601/PET.2022.07.05
• Atene Mendelyte (2022) Creative and crime scene photography: staged patricide and matricide as screen memories in Aida Chehrehgosha’s To Mom, Dad and My Two Brothers, photographies, 15:2, 167-186, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2022.2060291 

New Members

Please welcome new MotherNet member Dr Ieva Bisigirskaitė! Find out more about the project team members on our website >> 

MotherNet Training Activities

On 29 November – 2 December 2022 MotherNet member prof Jenny Björklund (Uppsala University (Sweden) has been awarded the Vilnius University Teaching and Learning Internationalisation Initiatives funding for the initiative Gender and Motherhood Studies and Research in the Baltic Sea Region. As part of this initiative in collaboration with the Horizon 2020 project MotherNet she offered a series of lectures and seminars on maternity and gender studies at Vilnius University Faculty of Philology and gave a public lecture entitled Runaway Moms: Mothers Who Leave their Families in the Twenty-First Century. More information on the lectures here and listen to the public lecture here. She will offer some supervisions to BA and MA students of the Faculty of Philology on their final theses in spring of 2023.

Research Development

On 23-25 January 2023 project partners held a workshop at Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology during which Prof Valerie Heffernan and Dr Marian Crowley-Henry from Maynooth University, Prof Jenny Björklund from Uppsala University, Dr Armi Mustosmäki from Jyväskylä University, Prof Eglė Šumskienė and Dr Eglė Kačkutė from Vilnius University worked on a joint research funding application and joint publications. More information here (in Lithuanian) >>

Monthly research colloquiums offer Vilnius University researchers an opportunity to meet, share their research, engage in discussions on theories and methods, and enhance their networking and collaboration and thus the quality of research in both formal and informal ways. Eight MotherNet colloquiums have been held at Vilnius University so far. The researchers are discussing their research topics, which include differences in the Lithuanian identity among families migrating due to political and economic reasons, perspectives of working mothers with disabilities, the experiences of Lithuanian mothers, who are raising their children in the diaspora, reproductive decisions and experiences of childlessness, and historical perspectives, such as postcolonial interpretations of good motherhood in Lithuania, women in the 16th-17th c. Latin literature of the Grand duchy of Lithuania, and child abandonment practices during the Soviet era in Lithuania. For more information on colloquiums for 2023 see here >>

Podcast

MotherNet podcasts curated by the MotherNet member and professor of Vilnius University Faculty of Philosophy, Eglė Šumskienė, are a great way to follow the Network members’ research on motherhood. You can listen to the podcasts (mostly but not exclusively in Lithuanian) on Spotify or you can watch the recordings on YouTube. The latest podcast “Regretting Motherhood” features the MotherNet members Prof Valerie Heffernan (Maynooth University) and Dr Maja Bodin (Uppsala University). Previous MotherNet podcasts covered such topics as the agentive potential of the intimate relationships of Russian mothers with their sons fighting in Ukraine, child removal from the family, the role of mothers in identity construction in Lithuanian migrant families, child abandonment practices during the Soviet era in Lithuania and the experiences of Lithuanian mothers, who are raising their children in diaspora. Listen to the podcast here >>