Mothering against motherhood: doula work, xenohospitality and the idea of the momrade

Today, a new vein of queer Marxist-feminist family-abolitionist theorising is reviving contemporary feminists’ willingness to imagine, politically, what women's liberationists in the 1970s called ‘mothering against motherhood’. Concurrently, the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom + comrade, has circulated persistently in the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities of mothers and/or leftists. This article asks: what if, in the name of abolishing the family, we took the joke entirely seriously? What makes a ‘mom’ a ‘momrade’, or vice versa? In what ways does the work of reproduction, conceivably, actively participate in class struggles, producing new worlds (and un-producing others)? How do the collective arts of mothering unmake selves? And how does the verb ‘to mother’ work to abolish the present state of things? The chosen point of departure for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality; a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, a definition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’. Further, the meaning of the term ‘family abolition’, here, is aptly summed up by the formula ‘xenofam ≥ biofam’; to abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial – that is to say, comradely – kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies. It grounds this utopianism, however, in first-hand experiences of informal ‘death doula’ labour. The labour of mothering one's mother is offered as a potential practice of un-mothering oneself and others. In fact, the argument pivots on these auto-ethnographic observations about maternal bereavement, because the event of the author's mother's death interrupted and intruded upon the feminist theorising involved.

Human rights education and the conscience of mankind: developing didactics of perplexity

The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that ‘disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’. From this point of departure, we argue that philosophical, political, and religious reflections on core concepts such as conscience, freedom, equality, dignity, justice, and peace can help to create an appropriate balance between a normative framework and a non-affirmative approach to human rights education. Teacher students can benefit from philosophical reflection, critical thinking, and individual judgement, as this will enhance the authoritativeness and self-determination of both teachers and learners. In terms of didactics, we consider the potentials of a concept-based approach inspired by the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and her critical discussion of the perplexities of the rights of man.

Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment

Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call ‘the near, the low, the common’. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson’s efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his ‘aversive thinking’: his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell’s Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell’s philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson’s engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.

Affordable Housing Reimagined

This paper explores contemporary affordable housing in Denmark. The aim is to unfold central ideas in some of the most progressive projects that have recently been designed and built. The paper goes into three areas of architecture, namely the social, the formal and the technological. In each area one aspect is analysed and discussed with a point of departure in a specific project: The social in relation to the neighbourly and The Orient by Dorte Mandrup, the formal in relation to the spacious and Dortheavej housing by BIG, and the technological in relation to the rebuildable and Circle House by Fællestegnestuen. The aim is to contribute to the current discourse on affordable housing from a Danish standpoint and in an architectural perspective.

On Wine, Wandering, and Wisdom: Musar and Adab in Medieval Sepharad

This article focuses on three Hebrew narrative works written in medieval Sepharad: Yosef ibn Zabarah’s Sefer ša‘ašu‘im [The book of delights], Yehudah al-Ḥarizi’s Sefer taḥkemoni [The book of Taḥkemoni], and Mišle he-‘araḇ [The sayings of the Arabs], by one Yiṣḥaq ha-Qaṭan. It takes their chapters on wine, traveling, and wisdom as a point of departure for examining the genre of musar or traditional ethical literature. It also reveals the multifaceted nature and function that this Hebrew genre acquired in the medieval period thanks to its contact with the Arabic tradition and in the context of the wide geographic diffusion of adab literature.

Trying out loud: Leadership development as experimentalism

Where does leadership development turn if its heroic ideals are no longer tenable? This study takes leadership practice, not the classroom, as its point of departure. Leadership studies have demonstrated the romance in leadership theory of an individual, stable, and coherent leadership figure, even if this figure does not connect to actual practices. In other streams of research, practice increasingly appears to be a resource for less presumptuous theorizing about leadership. These more situationally sensitive approaches call for equivalent leadership development practices, and extant literature in particular has escaped the confines of the executive management classroom to only a limited extent. While experiential learning has proved an efficient means of instigating and harvesting in-classroom experiences for subsequent reflection and learning, translating these experiences into (later) leadership practice has proved problematic. The mundanity of practice rarely corresponds to the theoretical exposés emanating from classrooms. Using a leadership development program (LDP) as our case, we explore accounts from managers carrying out in-practice experiments and analyze these processes in light of Dewey’s notion of experimentalism. Identifying a series of attributes associated with the experimental intervention, we illuminate some future avenues for situated leadership development as well as offer considerations for leadership development practice.

Designing and coding with BBC micro:bit to solve a real-world task – a challenging movement between contexts

Designing programmed technological solutions (PTS) with programming materials has become a way to contextualise educational content related to PTS and programming. However, studies show that pupils have difficulties conceptualising central phenomena involved in the process, which affects their ability to design PTS. In order to understand these difficulties, this study investigates pupils’ ways of experiencing the process of solving a real-world task with a programming material. The study takes its point of departure from a previous study that identified two central phenomena, the dual nature (structure and function) of PTS and the BBC micro:bit material, when pupils, aged 10 and 14, were designing a burglar alarm with the BBC micro:bit. The data was revisited with the aim of analysing pupils’ sequential discernment of critical aspects of the phenomena (i.e. aspects necessary to discern in order to understand phenomena), and how this affects how the design process unfolds. The results show that the movement from the real-world context toward the BBC micro:bit context is challenging. Pupils need to be able to connect conditions in the real-world context both to aspects of the dual nature of their PTS, and to aspects of the BBC micro:bit material that represent the dual nature. This suggests the importance of appreciating the BBC micro:bit context and the real-world context in relation to the dual nature of PTS, and of addressing the sequential stages of the process in which aspects of phenomena and their interrelations are emphasised, to help pupils see the PTS in the changing contexts.

Intersections of class, race and place

This essay presents an analysis of place references in the spontaneous talk of young Londoners from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. These place references function as ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004) which index multilayered meanings well beyond their denotations, constituting important resources for speakers’ local and supralocal positionings. The essay argues that ‘place’ is an important filter for our experience of language, gender and sexuality and provides scholars with a valuable point of departure for explorations of intersectional identities.

Forgiving Others and Compassion

The virtue of forgiving others and the virtue of compassion occupy a pivotal position in the core study model because they provide an important point of departure for explaining how spiritual support affects health. This fundamental issue is explored in three sections: (1) a theoretical rationale for focusing specifically on forgiveness and compassion is provided—in the process the social underpinning of these virtues is highlighted; (2) studies on the relationship between forgiveness and health as well as compassion and health are reviewed; (3) a submodel is introduced that aims to flesh out the nature of the relationship between spiritual support and these two social virtues is provided.