Neoliberal Austerity, Black Feminist Politics, and the Exploitation of Black Women's Motherwork in Rural Education in Jamaica

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Black Feminist and Decolonial Practices of Resistance in Education

Proposal

In this paper I seek to trace Black women’s non-contractual and socially reproductive labour in Jamaica; namely, the transhistorical phenomenon of “othermothering” and its deployment in public primary schooling. To achieve this, I draw on and amplify the voices of a cadre of Black women primary school teachers whom I have become warmly aquatinted with over a decade-long investigation into the state of Jamaican education economics. Together, these women have been educating me about the relationship between motherwork and teaching in their severely under resourced school context in the rural parish of Hanover. For this reason, this paper speaks to the necessary deployment of motherwork as a critical teaching praxis. It is a profoundly political labour of love that is acutely necessary (hooks, 2001). One that is a form of “life-work,” i.e., work that sustains life (Mullings 2021), that occurs as an agential act within the restricted possibilities of modern capitalism.

As it pertains to the relevancy of this work to the CIES 2024 Conference theme, “the power of protest,” I argue that as a transhistorical form of life-work, othermothering is a mode of resistance, and as such has been a sustaining feature of Black communities throughout time and space (Beatson, 2013; Getfield, 2022) by drawing on Black women’s ingenuity and creativity. James (1993), echoing Ramphele (1990) referred to this process as the development of Black women’s power that uses “resources of whatever kind to secure outcomes” (Ramphele, 1990, p. 14, quoted in James 1993). Power, in this respect, becomes the driving force behind action and the range of interventions of which an individual is capable (Ramphele, 1990). Therefore, I view othermothering as a Black feminist mechanism of everyday anti-colonial struggle because it foregrounds community survival, empowerment, love, care, and concern for humanity (Dillard, 2021). In the tradition of Caribbean women before them, my sister-teachers invest all aspects of the everyday life of their school with their activism (Jasor, 2021). This paper will highlight this labour and the ways in which it is exploited by the state.

Author

• Giselle Thompson, University of Alberta