Pandemic Motherhood: Exploring the Covid-19 Pandemic Through Engaged and Applied Arts

Pandemic Motherhood explores how various artistic practices and processes have been instrumental in processing, sharing, and learning about the intersectional epidemics unique to mothers living in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

Exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic and childcare converge to create challenging circumstances for women and mothers, the book interrogates ways in which individuals navigated these challenges through dance, performing arts, and theatre. Central to this topic is a growing body of literature about how applied performance affects change, activates transformation and healing, and engages communities in shared lived experience. The collection highlights artistic processes and experiences of developing, creating, devising, or contributing to artwork that centralizes topics of social inequity with pregnancy, motherhood, and womanhood. Pandemic Motherhood also features innovative artistic practices from contributing authors that illustrate complex, diverse experiences of contemporary and coexisting states of art making and mothering.

This edited collection is ideal for students, scholars, and researchers of applied and socially engaged arts, as well as students of sociology and gender studies.

Ali Duffy, PhD, is Professor and Graduate Director of Dance at Texas Tech University (USA), Artistic Director of Flatlands Dance Theatre, and co-founder of the International Parenting and Dance Network. She is mama to sweet Noah.

Sarah Johnson is Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Head of the MFA Dramaturgy program at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.

Tamar Neumann is an Instructor in English at Tarrant County College, USA. Her research focuses on the performances of open adoption, and how those performances highlight the social construction of families. Her creative work highlights the stories of those who live in open adoptions.