Research

My research interests are in gender and sexuality, motherhood and the maternal, feminist epistemologies, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophies of ethics, affect and event. My recent work has centred on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhood, female subjectivity and ethics. It spans an inter-disciplinary arena that takes in contemporary debates in relational, post-Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, the ethics of care, philosophies of otherness and event, phenomenology, and the use of autobiographical writing as a feminist research strategy.

My work draws on clinical experience gained from working therapeutically with mothers in a psychoanalytic psychotherapy service for women in North London, and I have published clinical papers on psychotherapeutic interventions with this client group. A monograph entitled Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) draws together this work. Maternal Encounters was the joint winner of the Feminist and Womens Studies Association book prize for outstanding feminist scholarship in 2009.

Current research projects

Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE)

• In 2007 I founded MaMSIE, an international interdisciplinary research network that brings together maternal research across the social sciences, literature and creative writing, feminist philosophy, psychoanalysis and the visual and performing arts.
• MaMSIE aims to open up and sustain critical debates about the maternal and explore the unique site the maternal occupies at the potent intersection between scientific possibilities, psychosocial practices and cultural representations.
• MaMSIE activities include:
• organising and hosting events such as conferences, symposia, workshops and study-days
• collecting and collating scholarly and aesthetic work on the maternal and stimulating discussion amongst the network's members through an online wiki and blog
• publishing an online interdisciplinary peer-reviewed scholarly journal which I co-edit, entitled: Studies in the Maternal.

Time Without Qualities

• I am working on a new monograph on 'non-developmental time', and the tropes of persistence, duration, endurance, staying and waiting in relation to capitalist temporalities.

Maternal Publics

• I am working on a new co-authored book with Dr. Imogen Tyler on Maternal Publics.