King’s College & Wilkes University Gender Studies Conference
King’s College and Wilkes University will host a joint Women's and Gender Studies Conference on April 14 and April 15, 2025, which will focus on the theme “The Evolution of Family Roles and Balancing Work and Family Dynamics.”
Dr. Abby Palko, inaugural director of the Residential Commons Program at Colgate University, will deliver a keynote presentation entitled “Intensively Empty Nests: What Happens When Ideologies of Intensive Motherhood Grow Up and Go to College” at 7 p.m. in the Burke Auditorium on April 14.
Palko’s scholarship focuses on cultural and literary representations of motherhood, with a focus on how rhetoric shapes and influences parenting. She also serves as a board member for the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS) and has taught courses in Irish literature, comparative literature, gender studies, and motherhood studies at every level from middle school through graduate school.
Event organizers are also seeking research students, staff, faculty, and community members on the availability of adequate childcare, evolving family roles and responsibilities, parental leave, and effective ways to manage professional responsibilities while maintaining a healthy family dynamic. However, we are happy to have presentations on a broad range of gender-related topics which do not connect directly to the conference theme. We also welcome presentations about service-learning, community service, and travel abroad opportunities.
Presentation proposals are due by March 3, 2025. Please use the proposal submission to submit your 150-word abstract.
Those presentations will be available to the public on April 15, 2025, from 8 a.m. through 8 p.m. on the third floor of the Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center. In the pqast, session types have included research presentations, panel discussions, video screenings, and performance art (e.g., poetry slam, dramatic performance, and dance).
Abstract for Dr. Palko's Presentation:
What do ideologies of mothering practices have to do with you, a current college student, you might ask? I often start my talks and articles with the observation that, while not everyone is a mother, everyone has a (biological) mother. Contemporary parenting is shaped by philosophical ideologies and social trends, amplified by (social) media messages. Intensive mothering ideologies impose pressures that, exacerbated by insufficient sociopolitical support systems (paid leave, robust child care options, etc) for parents, intensify the contemporary burden of motherhood.
From the 1980s onward, American culture, broadly speaking, has embraced and incentivized intensive mothering ideologies. For example, in 2012, a Time magazine cover went viral: it depicted a mother who had embraced attachment parenting philosophies breastfeeding her three-year-old child. What does this parenting trend mean for you, raised under its influence, or for your collegiate experience, or for your potential parenting future? Does Winnecott’s “good enough mother” answer the societal expectation to, in the words of A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez, founder of the #FreeBlackmotherhood movement, “live only for your children, and not for yourself”?
How does this connect to the epidemic of loneliness spreading among your generation? What role does (social) media play? How can these questions prompt insights that lead you to the tools that will empower you to build the life you want to live? This talk will explore these questions to reflect on how intensive mothering ideologies enforce current expectations held of mothers, and how they, in turn, impact your generation’s experience of higher education.
The conference is part of an annual series offered by the Women's Studies Program at King's College and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Wilkes University, which alternate between the two campuses every year.
