Mother, motherhood, mothering:A conversation on feminist futures across generations, cultures, and life experiences

In this article, three women come together to explore what “mother, motherhood, and mothering” – terms that occupy a unique space in feminist discourse, as personal experiences and deeply political institutions (e.g. Zufferey & Buchanan, 2019) – mean within feminist futures. All three of us work in the field of futures – Author 1 and Author 2 in a strategy-design consultancy and Author 3 as a researcher and teacher at a university. Anchored in the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008) as a framework, we discuss how the weight of the past, the push of the present, and the pull of the future shape our views on these roles. Inspired by Milojević (2024, p.34), this framework was also chosen to explore collective feminist futures from individual voices to find tensions and commonalities with the concepts of “mother, motherhood, and mothering”. Following feminist calls, we write in the first person to reflect our embodied and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), shaped by our diverse life stages, lived experiences, different perspectives (being a mother, becoming a mother, and not being a mother), and cultural backgrounds. Embracing a methodology of collaborative writing (Wyatt et al., 2011), we aim to disrupt habitual patterns and foster greater plurality in academic work (Helin, 2020; Henderson & Black, 2018) and from the belief that mothering has the power to disrupt parts of our present system (Grettve, 2024, p.16). Our approach seeks a more personal form of writing that embraces vulnerability and takes creative risks (Helin, 2020).