The Centre for Social Sciences Research (CSSR) and the  Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa  (IDCPPA) at the University of Cape Town invite you to join us for a lunchtime seminar on 13 August 2024 at 12:45pm. The seminar will be presented by Prof Ameeta Jaga and Prof Fiona Ross.

About the Seminar:

Insights about the Motherload: Recognising care realities and creating caring economies

In 2023, UCT's Vision 2030 Grand Challenges Programme funded a pilot project, Co-creating sustainable pathways for low-income mothers' quality of life. This project was a collaboration between academics from UCT, SAMRC, and UKZN, the Western Cape Government's Policy and Strategy Unit, Flourish, and 12 low-income mothers. Employing participatory methodologies, including photovoice, the project aimed to identify low-income mothers' strengths, needs, and struggles to explore transformative interventions for improving their quality of life. From the project, we have derived the concept 'The Motherload' which allows consideration of the ways that social, emotional and infrastructural failures interact with one another and everyday life in low-income communities, contributing to the unequal burden of care those who mother face.

The Motherload project sheds light on the complex realities of motherhood and uses these to drive policy changes to recognise and reduce women's care work and to improve their economic security, safety, and wellbeing. The pilot findings flagged the need for new approaches to policy development, moving away from the prevailing 'top-down' process and towards foregrounding mothers' lived realities. The pilot's success generated a second phase, attracting funding from Global Affairs Canada and IDRC's Scaling Carelnnovations grant in a project titled, "Sharing The Motherload — Engaging fathers and other key stakeholders to transform gender policy and foster care economies". We scale the pilot by including low-income fathers' perspectives and expanding our reach to diverse government partners, focusing on improving infrastructures and shifting gender norms. The Motherload is a project where art, activism, and academia intersect to prioritise and amplify the voices of low-income black South African mothers.

Speakers

Ameeta Jaga, Professor of Organisational Psychology at UCT, researches gendered and social class work-family concerns. Using Southern theories and decolonial methodologies, her work aims for epistemic justice, influencing workplace breastfeeding supports and care work policy.

Fiona Ross, Professor of Anthropology at UCT, draws on ethnographic approaches to consider reproduction, infancy, maternal worlds and the knowledge base that shapes social and health policies.

 13 August 2024
 12:45 - 14:00 SAST
  CSSR Seminar Room, 4.29 Robert Leslie Social Science Building, UCT

Hosted by the Centre for Social Science Research and the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa