The Mothers’ Club of Cambridge, 1878-1904: Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and (Re)presenting Expert Knowledge of Mothering

Expert knowledge such as prescriptions for motherhood devalues local/traditional knowledge, yet practitioners of local knowledges such as mothers may resist this,often through the reappropriation of expert knowledges. To illustrate the processes of reappropriation, reconfiguration, and representation of expert knowledges of motherhood, I present a case history of the Mothers’ Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts, uncovering the process whereby this group of mothers created a space within expert discourse for reassertion of their own experiential expertise. The club functioned as anode between expert discourse and everyday practice by reviewing the child rearing prescriptions of established experts, reappropriating this knowledge by testing it experientially, and reconfiguring it to suit their local milieu. This reappropriation and reconfiguration culminated in the (re)presentation of expert knowledge as themembers began delivering expert lectures to local settlement house mothers andpublished their own advice book. For the settlement house mothers, the Mothers’ Club constituted an intermediary set of experts. For its members, the Mother’s Clubof Cambridge constituted a site through which generations of mothers supportedone another in their mothering work by providing space in which to negotiatethe tension between their local and experiential knowledge as mothers and expertknowledges of childrearing

A Reappraisal of Children’s ‘Potential’

What does it mean for a child to fulfil his or her potential? This article explores the contexts and implications of the much-used concept of potential in educational discourses. We claim that many of the popular, political and educational uses of the term in relation to childhood have a problematic blind spot: interpersonality, and the necessary coexistence for the concept to be receivable of all children’s ‘potentials’. Rather than advocating abandoning the term—a futile gesture given its emotive force—we argue that the concept of children’s potential must be profoundly rethought to be workable as a philosophical notion in education. In an era marked by the unspoken assumption that ‘unlimited potential’ is always a good thing, we argue that it might be necessary to think about the limitations of the notion of individual potential; namely, the moment when it comes into contact with other people’s projects. We propose a conceptualisation of potential as the negotiated, situated, ever-changing creation of a group of individuals, in a process marked by conflict, and which remains essentially difficult.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9508-

Making Dinner

With a vast selection of foods and thousands of recipes to choose from, how do home cooks in America decide what to cook – and what does their cooking mean to them? Answering this question, Making Dinner is an empirical study of home cooking in the United States. Drawing on a combination of research methods, which includes in-depth interviews with over 50 cooks and cooking journals documenting over 300 home-cooked dinners, Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert explore how American home cooks think and feel about themselves, food, and cooking. Their findings reveal distinct types of cook—the family-first cook, the traditional cook, and the keen cook—and demonstrate how personal identities, family relationships, ideologies of gender and parenthood, and structural constraints all influence what ends up on the plate. Rawlins and Livert reveal research that fills the data gap on practices of home cooking in everyday life. This is an important contribution to fields such as food studies, health and nutrition, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and American studies.</JATS1:p