Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectually Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting

Pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly subjected to surveillance, by medical professionals, the media and the general public; and discourses of ideal parenting are propagated alongside an admonishment of the perceived ‘failing’ maternal subject. However, despite this scrutiny, the mundane activities of parenting are often impervious to ethnographic forms of inquiry. Challenges for ethnographic researchers include the restrictions of becoming immersed in the private space of the home where parenting occurs, and an institutional structure that discourages exploratory and long-term fieldwork. This paper draws on four studies, involving 34 participants, which explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography including artefacts, photo-elicitation, timelines, collage and sandboxing. The paper argues that visual methodologies can enable access to unseen aspects of parenting, and engender forms of temporal extension, which can help researchers to disrupt the restrictions of tightly time bounded projects

‘Watching what I’m doing, watching how I’m doing it’: Exploring the everyday experiences of surveillance and silenced voices among marginalised mothers in Welsh low-income locales

Motherhood and mothering are conceived in relation to classed hierarchies through which those in living in poverty become characterised by ‘otherhood’ and ‘othering’. This positioning leaves them vulnerable to overt and indirect forms of criticism, surveillance and policing from family, friends, professionals and strangers; against a background of demonisation of particular types of mothers and mothering practices in the wider mediascape. This paper draws on three studies, involving 28 participants, which explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The participants all resided in low-income locales. Many participants had resided in homeless hostels and mother and baby units before being placed in local authority housing or low grade rented accommodation. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography including photo-elicitation, timelines, emotion stickers, collage and sandboxing. Participants discussed different forms of surveillance where other people were characterised as ‘watching what I’m doing, watching how I’m doing it’. These forms of watching ranged from the structured policing encountered in mother-and-baby units to more informal comments from passers-by or passengers on a bus journey; and an awareness of how mothers in state housing are depicted in the media. These interactions were sometimes met with resistance, at other times they were simply another incident that participants negotiated in a growing tapestry of disrespect and devaluation. This chapter argues that these discourses demonise and alienate mothers living on the margins, making already difficult journeys a constant struggle in the moral maze of contemporary motherhood and its accompanying conceptualisations of ‘otherhood’