Political Leanings:
Liberal | Conservative |
Western University - Women's Studies
Researcher and Lecturer
Patricia
Hamilton
I'm a qualitative researcher working on a project about parental leave in the UK, specifically focusing on black parents' experiences.
I have a wide range of interests including gender equality, diversity, parenting culture, and policy analysis. I have international teaching and facilitation experience with a variety of learners as well as report writing and data analysis skills. My last project examined black mothers' engagement with attachment parenting as it emerges in a neoliberal context. I conducted interviews with black mothers living in the UK and Canada and my analysis explored their experience of motherhood as it reflects the influence of race, class and gender.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Women's Studies and Feminist Research
Instructor
I designed and taught a fourth-year seminar course titled Race and the Social Construction of Motherhood.
Teaching Assistant
I led tutorials and marked assignments and exams for the following first year courses: Introduction to Women's Studies, Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Gender, Justice & Change
I also gave a guest lecture on Queer Feminism to the Introduction to Women's Studies course and a guest lecture on my experiences of fieldwork to the Feminist Methodologies graduate course
Honours
English Literature
Funded by a Postgraduate Honours Merit Award
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
English Literature and Sociology
Co-founded The F Word, a feminist student organization
Received the University Council Merit scholarship (2008)
Received the Spanish Embassy Prize (2008)
Tutor
I taught close reading and critical thinking to first year BA English students. I led tutorials and marked assignments and tests for the Critical Thinking and English components of first year Electrical Engineering and Civil Engineering courses.
I also gave a guest lecture on "Moon"
MA
Gender Studies
Funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship
Dissertation titled: "Blacktivist: The Breastfeeding Black Woman and the Lactivist Movement"
Australian Feminist Studies
In the last 20 years, a new parenting philosophy has garnered increasing attention and popularity. Coined by William Sears in the early 1980s, attachment parenting (AP) proposes that secure attachment between parent and child is necessary for optimal development and therefore ‘good’ parenting. Simultaneously, neoliberalism, a socio-political context defined by market logic, has emerged as the dominant global trend. In this article, I examine the correspondence between AP, and the broader ideology of intensive mothering it expresses, and the parenting- related policies advanced by the neoliberal state. Specifically, I focus on how birth and breastfeeding policy in Britain aligns with AP, contextualising the emergence of AP and its appearance in contemporary state policy as the result of two features of neoliberalism: postmaternal and post-racial thinking. I draw attention to the experiences of black mothers and, through this lens, reveal the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of ‘good’ parenting. In my examination of these policies, I argue that postmaternal and postracial thinking have enabled the emergence of AP, an approach that individualises child-rearing and relies upon an uncritical appropriation of the so-called traditional practices of racialised women.
Australian Feminist Studies
In the last 20 years, a new parenting philosophy has garnered increasing attention and popularity. Coined by William Sears in the early 1980s, attachment parenting (AP) proposes that secure attachment between parent and child is necessary for optimal development and therefore ‘good’ parenting. Simultaneously, neoliberalism, a socio-political context defined by market logic, has emerged as the dominant global trend. In this article, I examine the correspondence between AP, and the broader ideology of intensive mothering it expresses, and the parenting- related policies advanced by the neoliberal state. Specifically, I focus on how birth and breastfeeding policy in Britain aligns with AP, contextualising the emergence of AP and its appearance in contemporary state policy as the result of two features of neoliberalism: postmaternal and post-racial thinking. I draw attention to the experiences of black mothers and, through this lens, reveal the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of ‘good’ parenting. In my examination of these policies, I argue that postmaternal and postracial thinking have enabled the emergence of AP, an approach that individualises child-rearing and relies upon an uncritical appropriation of the so-called traditional practices of racialised women.
Journal of Youth Studies
This article discusses how young mothers in London, a mid-size city in Canada, utilize a drop-in centre service while attending an alternative programme to acquire secondary school credits. The central arguments made here are informed by key concepts in the field of girlhood studies. With its attention to the interconnections between gender, age, and generation as well as other aspects of social identity, girlhood studies provides crucial insight into the lived experiences of young mothers who straddle the space between girlhood and adulthood. We interpret the experiences of the young mothers who participated in this study in light of shifting meanings and expectations of girls and girlhood in the neoliberal era. Drawing on the concept of the ideal neoliberal girl subject embodied in the ‘can do’ and ‘at risk’ girl, this paper highlights the tensions in accessing a drop-in centre, which functions as both a site of security and surveillance, for a group of young mothers receiving social services. The findings revealed how girls who are mothers struggle to live in the present to assert a legitimate maternal identity even as they are prepared for the future through neoliberal public policies and other disciplinary practices.