SUBMIT by DECEMBER 1, 2025 please or write for extension
March 27, 28 (in-person) & 29 (online) 2026
For the past 20 years, since 2005, the Museum of Motherhood (MoM) has been bringing together scholars, mother-artists, change makers, and community members for the Annual Academic & Arts MoM Conference.
We have welcomed participants from around the world to join us in person and on Zoom as they share research, expertise, creative projects, and a passion for the issues, obstacles and health-related topics affecting women, m/others and families. This year is no different!
JOIN US for this year’s theme of Reproductive Identities and Resistance: Mothers and Others in Culture, Community and Collaboration
Academics, Artists & Activists
This year’s conference theme is grounded in Aurélie M. Athan’s concept of reproductive identity as a lifelong meaning-making process regarding how individuals orient themselves to reproduction, parenting, and caregiving, and the “if/when/how/who” associated with reproductive decision-making.
As a concept, reproductive identity is fluid and resists pronatalist and patriarchal mandates that dictate narrow expectations about reproductive outcomes and parenting. It centers an individual’s lived experiences and associated meanings about all aspects of reproduction, including being childfree, pregnancy, infertility, abortion, pregnancy loss and grief, adoption, and extended family systems of caregiving. The various and ever-changing meanings associated with reproduction (or reproductive potential) across the lifespan is paramount to understanding reproductive identity as a concept with emotional, spiritual, financial, familial, cultural, and political influences and implications. As a conference theme, we welcome work that shares interdisciplinary, feminist, holistic, developmental, and narrative inquiry with reproductive identity as a concept.
We invite critical reflection and collective inquiry into how maternal, reproductive, and care-centered identities are formed, challenged, and transformed across contexts, relationships, and life stages. We seek work that explores these identities not only as individual journeys, but as deeply social, political, and communal acts.
This international call for papers, performances, panels, workshops, and creative projects welcomes contributions from across disciplines and practices—including scholars, artists, poets, sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, gender and sexuality studies faculty, birth-workers, doulas, midwives, physicians, students, and community members.
We encourage submissions from people of all genders and backgrounds, particularly those centering marginalized parenting and birthing experiences. We especially welcome work that uses innovative, decolonial, or creative research methodologies; amplifies underrepresented or silenced experiences of m/otherhood and birthing; engages in activist or community-based praxis for reproductive and birth justice; reclaims reproductive labor as power, protest, and possibility; and challenges binaries of parent/non-parent, gendered caregiver roles, and “good mother” ideologies.
We welcome submissions from students. We will have special events geared toward students including mentoring sessions and a writing workshop!
Subthemes include (but are not limited to):
- Reproductive and Birth Justice Movements
- Black Maternal Health
- Intersectional M/Other Identities & (Dis)Abilities
- M/Othering Across the Lifespan: From Matrescence to Elderhood
- Queering (Re)Production & Parenting
- Artmaking and Creativity as Resistance
- The Messiness of M/Otherhood & M/Other Studies
- Care-giving and Care Labor in Families, Health Systems, and Beyond
- Authentic and Community-Based Forms of Healing
- Empowering M/others of All Kinds
- “Who Am I?”: Identity, Transformation, and the Self-in-Community
Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal that falls outside our conference subthemes. We want to expand the dialogue around scholarship and art pertaining to Mother Studies, so if you think your proposal might be a good fit, we want to see it!
Formats may include in-person or virtual presentations, including the following:
- Academic Papers and Panels
- Performance Art or Spoken Word/Poetry Readings
- Visual Art Exhibits
- Storytelling or Narrative-Based Presentations
- Roundtables (Dialogues) or Workshops
- Moderators: We encourage individuals to submit their interest in moderating a panel presentation (in addition to or instead of submitting your own work); the submission portal will prompt you to include your area of expertise.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a 250 word abstract or project proposal, along with a short bio (100 words), and your preferred presentation format including your in-person or virtual participation by Dec 7, 2025. Note that all virtual presentations will be scheduled for March 29, 2026.
CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in 2026. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making art, working in therapeutic, medical, university, and birth settings, as well as auto-ethnographic perspectives by m/others, family members, & students. Submissions must include a title, bio, & abstract. Conference applications are due December 7, 2025. These include all submission types (e.g. performance, media, music).
TO SUBMIT: go to https://jourms.org/submit/. Questions can be emailed directly to JourMS@gmail.com. Or call 877-711-MOMS (6667) leave a message. All submissions may also be considered for publication in the Journal of Mother Studies (JourMS.org) at presenter’s discretion. MOMmuseum.org St. Pete, FL USA.
JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the conference should also consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to Mother Studies published annually. Final submissions for the Journal are due by May 30th (midnight). JourMS
*In gratitude to USF for their abundant support – ALL USF STUDENTS & STAFF MAY REGISTER FOR FREE ATTENDANCE TO THE CONFERENCE. Please follow the link below and sign up using the form at the bottom of the ‘registration’ page.
Campus Map Here
Annual Academic & Arts MoM Conference Schedule 2025– SCHEDULE/ MORE
Annual Academic & Arts MoM Conference Schedule 2024 –SCHEDULE / PRESS RELEASE
The 10th Annual Academic M.O.M. Conference was held a CUNY, The Graduate Center in 2015, sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Dept. Find out more by going to the Museum of Motherhood and clicking here.
- JourMS - 
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