- Title
- The Shock of the new (baby): the art of balancing creative practice, academia and motherhood
- Creator
- O'Callaghan, Simone
- Relation
- The Elephant's Leg: Adventures in the Creative Industries p. 108-123
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/978-1-86335-244-4/CGP
- Publisher
- Common Ground
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- In 2015, the cover story of The New Statesman called “The Motherhood Trap,” caused controversy by highlighting the notion that the most successful women in politics are childless, citing examples such as Theresa May and Angela Merkel, whilst raising questions about our society as a whole. It stated, “It seems like a great time to be a woman in politics—but the fact that childless women are vilified as selfish, while so few mothers make it to the top, reveals an uncomfortable truth about how far we still have to go to achieve quality,” (Lewis, 2015). The same too could be said of academia. This book chapter navigates these murky waters through recent peer-reviewed literature, and documented women’s experiences to examine the flipside of what it means to have children, balancing the competing priorities of being the primary caregiver with the demands of academia, research and creative practice. The experiences of early parenthood are those of many shocks to the system, coupled with a rite of passage to be survived. Such survival of the artistacademicmother is unpacked in this chapter through the lens of understanding that such people are required to concurrently inhabit caring, research and artistic mental spaces, when sleep deprivation means that even Maslow’s basic physiological needs not met for these individuals. How then, is it possible to also operate at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the self-actualisation space where creativity and art-making take place? This conundrum of creative co-existence at multiple levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy is explored through the discussion of two creative-practice based research projects that explore human experiences. Unpacked within these discussions are models of creative practice-based research, and the issues are Adventures in the Creative Industries faced by female researchers such as gaining funding whilst pregnant; managing expectations; maintaining creative practice; and how such women can stand up and become role models for future female academics.
- Subject
- gender; parenthood; creative practice; Maslow's Theory of Basic Needs
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1441980
- Identifier
- uon:41591
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780949313812
- Language
- eng
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