Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development (OLPD) Assistant Professor Nicole Dillard (left) and Taylor Cavallo Siering, a PhD student in OLPD’s Human Resource Development program, recently collaborated on a project exploring various cultural narratives of motherhood and work. These narratives have grown more complicated in recent years, particularly due to the COVID-19 and racism pandemics of 2020. What’s worse is that upheavals such as these pandemics tend to further exclude or overlook women of color and others who occupy marginalized identities.
Dillard and Cavallo Siering’s work, “The Stories We Tell: Narratives of Mothering and Work during the Dual Pandemics of 2020,” was published in the 2023 spring/summer issue of the interdisciplinary Journal of the Motherhood Initiative. The theme of the issue is “Learning from the Pandemic: Possibilities and Challenges for Mothers and Families.”
“Our goal is to expose the gaps within these narratives against the backdrop of the dual pandemics and explore the historical and social contexts in which other narratives of mothering and work exist for women of color and other women with marginalized identities,” Dillard and Cavallo Siering say in their introduction. “Through centering the individual counterstories that challenge problematic narratives, we aim to use these examples to outline optimistic yet realistic possibilities that explore complexities within mothering and work and support learning and social change for a post-pandemic world.”
