Journal of Mother Studies, 2025 Issue – RECLAMATION
This year, a unifying theme of reclamation emerged from the submissions to the Journal of Mother Studies. Across disciplines, contributors engaged in the critical recovery of maternal knowledge, agency, and embodied wisdom. Their work interrogates the structures that have historically obscured or diminished maternal subjectivity while simultaneously offering new frameworks through which to understand motherhood as a generative intellectual and creative force. Taken together, these contributions position reclamation as an active reconstitution of maternal presence within cultural, academic, and artistic discourse.
In these pages, readers will encounter a dynamic range of scholarship and creative practice that reclaims motherhood as both inquiry and praxis. Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad contributes both a photo essay titled “Mommy Professor of the Year” and a study on incarcerated m/otherhood. Her work situates maternal identity within systems of confinement, emphasizing how mothers endure and adapt amid structures that seek to separate and silence them. From Uganda, Itah Patience Mbethki’s “A Mother’s Body is a Temple” repositions the maternal body as both sacred and insurgent, foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and self-determination.
Visual and performative pieces by Courtney Kessel (“Cyborgs and Chimeras”) and by Amy Wagner, Susan Smith, and Amy Crocker (“Graphic Pregnancy”) extend this theme, exploring how artistic practice can reclaim maternal narratives from cultural marginalization and open new avenues for productive dialogue. Similarly, Sarah McCarthy’s “The Song is the Spark” highlights collective singing as an embodied act of maternal empowerment and community formation. In the poetic and reflective works of Jess Fedenia (“Involution”) and Alyse Keller Johnson (“Mothering Me, Mothering You”), themes of loss and transformation unfold within the cyclical rhythm of mothering, where care is continually reshaped by time and change.
Finally, the issue grounds these theoretical and creative explorations in applied contexts. Miranda Mestas Vatterott’s “The Call to Integrate Feminism and Attachment Theory” and Jill Wood’s “Birth(ing) Justice” both advocate for feminist and embodied pedagogies that center the lived experiences of mothers as sources of theoretical, ethical, and practical insight for contemporary praxis.
Collectively, these works form a layered conversation on reclamation. They tell us that the study of motherhood continues to evolve through acts of critical expression and imaginative reconstruction. As we move forward, may this issue stand as both documentation and invitation to continue reclaiming the maternal as a vital site of scholarship, creativity, healing, and resistance.
As always, I extend deep gratitude to the contributors whose scholarship and creativity make this journal possible. I am especially grateful to Martha Joy Rose, founder of the Journal of Mother Studies and visionary in this field, whose efforts built an interdisciplinary platform for this work, a space where maternal voices, experiences, and theories are recognized as vital forms of knowledge. Her ongoing commitment to this work inspires and sustains an international community of feminist scholars and artists.
With gratitude,
Meagan Welch, M.Ed, PhD (ABD)
Lead Editor, Journal of Mother Studies
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