Graduate Seminar Series 2025/26 - Session 2

Second Seminar

Feminist Reflections on Parenthood, Paternity and Masculinities

December 10, 2025

The link to join the seminar will be published closer to the date.

Adam Kluge

University of Oxford

Bounded Relations: Family, Intimacy, and the Emotional Life of Bordered Mothering

Scholars across a host of disciplines have increasingly focused on the interplay between familial relationships, transnational migration, and the punitive dimensions of border enforcement (Harker and Martin 2012). To this end, recent research has further posited that border policing regimes actively engender relational enforcement tactics that target both individual migrants and the familial networks of which they are a part (Coddington and Williams 2022). However, this growing recognition in the academic literature of the migrant family’s role in defining borders has not sufficiently articulated the emotional and affective labour engaged in by the mothers of those ensnared in deportation regimes (Wharton 2009).Drawing on Anderson’s (2009) concept of ‘affective atmospheres’ and Strasser et al.’s (2009) outline of ‘doing family’ in the context of recent fascistic developments in American im/migration, this chapter calls for a nuanced critical framework that acknowledges and examines the emotional toll of border policing on the mothers of those facing arrest and deportation. I suggest that the characteristic violence and moral ambivalence attached to border enforcement and im/migration-related policy reverberates beyond migrants themselves, as the mothers of these subjects are redefined according to their proximity to the perceived ‘evils’ of ‘illegal’ movements (Turner 2020; Jones 2016). Consequently, I argue that rendering these mothers visible might allow for a more just framework of family life/worldmaking at the border, revealing the invisible ways in which mothers routinely reinvent their presentation of self––what Kallio and Häkli (2019) call familiality––to negotiate their relationship to harmful border practices and the threat of bordered violence.Furthermore, I suggest that the stigmatised status placed upon the families of detained immigrants may influence the actions and decisions of these mothers, as they attempt to reconcile the public response to their criminal status with the private intimacy of their home lives. Ultimately, this paper sees the mothers of immigrants as entangled in a set of ‘bounded relations’, which place their personal relationships in conflict with the emotional landscape of the physical border.

Tirza Sey

University of Warwick

Abjects of Austerity: The Scapegoating of Black Single Mothers in British Political Discourse, 2010-2019

This study examined the representations of black single mothers within British political discourse during the UK's austerity period (2010–2019). While research addressed the scapegoating of single mothers in this period, race was largely overlooked, leaving a gap in understanding how ethnic minority single mothers were framed. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of ten Prime Ministerial speeches delivered between 2010 and 2019, the study investigated the implicitly racialised narratives embedded in discussions of single motherhood. It specifically considered how the government represented black single mothers in ways that legitimised their positioning as scapegoats for the UK’s socio-economic problems. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, the study adopted an approach that centred on race to explore how racialised notions shaped representations of single mothers, particularly those outside the normative paradigm of white motherhood. The analysis compared portrayals of black single mothers with generalised constructions of single mothers to assess the extent and implications of racial differentiation. Findings revealed the prevalent use of inferentially racialised discourse in the representation of the single mother within the political speeches. While black single mothers often aligned with normative portrayals, they were distinctly pathologised as mentally unstable, socially parasitic, and producers of criminal offspring.

Juliana Morad Acero

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Impacts of the Expansion of Paternity Leave and the Introduction of Shared and Flexible Part-Time Leave in 2021 in Colombia

This paper evaluates the impact of Law 2114 of 2021 in Colombia, which expanded paternity leave, introduced shared parental leave, and created flexible part-time schemes to redistribute caregiving responsibilities between men and women. Using microdata from the Colombian Household Survey (GEIH) for 2019–2023 and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we estimate the law’s effects on five labor outcomes: pension contributions, labor income, hours worked, inactivity, and self-employment. The analysis is disaggregated by gender, marital status, and sector to capture heterogeneous responses.Findings reveal significant effects among specific subgroups. Fertile women experienced lower inactivity and more hours worked, particularly in stable sectors such as education, health, and public administration, where pension contributions also rose. Married fertile women, eligible for shared leave, showed further declines in inactivity. For fertile men, overall effects were limited, yet in non-pandemic-affected sectors pension contributions and self-employment increased significantly. These results suggest that while aggregate impacts remain modest, the reform fostered measurable labor adjustments where institutional and household conditions favored co-responsibility. We conclude that expanding paternity leave and enabling shared, flexible schemes are important steps, but insufficient to transform gendered labor and care dynamics in a highly informal labor market. More ambitious reforms, structural incentives, and cultural change are required for effective co-responsibility.