The Globalization of Motherhood Research Network
The Globalization of Motherhood Research Network (GMRN) is a joint initiative of the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and the Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research, focused on exploring the intersections of transnational care, transnational adoption and global assisted reproductive technologies. Fertility, mothering and caring labor are key elements of successful societies and buoyant economies. Developed nations face challenges around declining fertility, aging populations and the provision of caring labor as women’s paid work reshapes mothering care and decision-making. Developing nations face challenges around population health, poverty and care. These intersecting trends in the context of a rapidly globalizing world make women’s labor, both paid and unpaid, central to development, global movement, and global health. While women’s reproductive and caring labor has always been a cornerstone of national frameworks of care and development, current patterns of globalization mean that these caring labors, are integral to the processes and patterns of globalization that cross and shape national boundaries.
Women are highly mobile global citizens; and their movement is predicated on the gendered sexed services that they are transferring across national boundaries. While mobility through sex work has attracted significant academic, regulatory and human rights attention, the movement of babies, reproductive body parts and women’s caring and reproductive labor have neither been fully documented and examined, nor considered in relationship to one another. The GMRN brought together research from the Global North and the Global South to illuminate how contemporary motherhood is being changed by the processes of globalization. We examined the ways in which conception, gestation mothering labor and care are being mobilized across national boundaries and between different domains of technology, adoption and care work. Considering these multiple forms of caring and reproductive labor together allowed for an interrogation of the globalization of motherhood with a focus on the impacts on women who mother- and enable others to do so.
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The Globalization of Motherhood Research Network Symposium
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