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Experiencing and Knowing from a Mother/Child ‘Us’

image of Experiencing and Knowing from a Mother/Child ‘Us’

Beginning with my lived experience of post-natal anxiety and interweaving findings from my doctoral thesis into mother's experiences of holding their children, this Chapter explores an intersubjective maternal identity. I convey how artmaking illuminates difficult to articulate experiences of identity that defy known and accepted notions of Self.

Employing visual and written stories, I invite readers into the strange but meaningful experiencing of what I call the mother/child ‘us’. This ‘us’ captures the highly valuable, rewarding but also challenging relational re-configuring of mother and child together during holding and the ways this can be experienced as a maternal self-in-relationship.

Keywords: art making ; arts-based ; intersubjectivity ; lived experience ; maternal ; maternal child health ; maternal child wellbeing ; maternal holding ; mother and child ; mother/child us ; mothering ; multimodality ; post-natal anxiety ; relational identity ; relationally

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Experiencing and Knowing from a Mother/Child ‘Us’
Intellect , 32 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835950166_4
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  2. Allen, Patricia (1995), Art Is a Way of Knowing, Boston, MA: Shambhala.
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  3. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, London: Duke University Press.
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  4. Barone, Tom and Eisner, Elliot (2012), Arts Based Research, Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
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  5. Bergum, Vangie (1997), A Child on Her Mind: The Experience of Becoming a Mother, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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  6. Botero, Maria (2020), ‘Chimpanzees correct cultural biases about how good mothers behave’, Psyche, 25 November, https://psyche.co/ideas/chimpanzees-correct-cultural-biases-about-how-good-mothers-behave. Accessed 18 February 2021.
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  10. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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  17. Fullerton, Anna Martha (1911), A Handbook of Obstetric Nursing for Nurses, Students and Mothers, Philadelphia, PA: Blakiston's Son and Company.50
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  18. Fusaroli, Riccardo, Demuru, Paolo and Borghi, Anna M. (2009), ‘The intersubjectivity of embodiment’, Journal of Cognitive Semiotics, 4:1, pp. 1–5.
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  21. Grand, Sue and Salberg, Jill (eds) (2016), Trans-generational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues across History and Difference, London and New York: Routledge.
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  23. Heron, John and Reason, Peter (1997), ‘A participatory inquiry paradigm’, Qualitative Inquiry, 3:3, pp. 274–94.
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  24. Hogan, Susan (2015), ‘Mothers make art: Using participatory art to explore the transition to motherhood’, Journal of Applied Arts and Health, 6:1, http://www.derby.ac.uk/health-and-social-care/research/birth-project/films. Accessed 12 December 2023.
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  29. Levine, S. (2009), ‘Researching imagination: Imagining research’, in Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy: The Arts and Human Suffering, London: Jessica Kingsley.
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  33. Moy, Ariel (2019), ‘Maternal holding and the storying of the mother/child “us”: A collaborative multimodal inquiry’, Ph.D. thesis, Melbourne: The Miecat Institute.
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