(Re)imagining Just Futures for Lactating Teacher-Parents: Narrative Fiction as Feminist Refusal

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Moving Toward Justice Through Qualitative Inquiry (Table 34)

Abstract

This paper documents the beginnings of a journey that led to fiction as a form of analysis in feminist qualitative research. In Fall 2021, I collected interview and focus group data from six classroom teachers in the U.S. about their experiences with lactation– or pumping– upon return to work following the birth of a child, culminating in a utopian short story of lactation in education. I present an excerpt of that story here, not as a mechanism by which I purport to form grand conclusions about the lived experiences of lactating teacher-parents, but as a tool with which we can begin to (re)imagine possibilities for inviting nursing parents in all their embodied humanity into public school classrooms.

Author

• Kelsey Benson, University of Georgia