A Revolutionary Lexicon for Mother-demics

In this creative-critical text, two academic mothers working in the field of contemporary performance attempt to find a lexicon (a vocabulary and a dictionary), for the synchronous work of motherhood and academia. As a revolutionary gesture and resistant act, we (Lucy and Laura) devise a project called Term-Time, a weekly online meeting for us to become a tiny community of mother-demics.
A ‘term’ can be a way of describing or communicating something, a linguistic expression of an idea defining categories and genres. ‘Term’ can also refer to time: capturing how long something lasts, its temporal limits and parameters. Terms can be structures: in the UK, academic semesters are referred to as ‘terms’. We disrupted our term time with creative interventions, carving time in our term time to understand term time(s) for mother-demics.
Drawing on collaborations of mother-demics in the field of maternal performance such as Šimić and Underwood-Lee (2021, 2022, 2023), and critical theory exploring maternal time (Baraitser, 2009, 2017, and Putnam, 2022), we ask: what are the temporal and embodied connections between academic work (in the field of performance) and motherwork (Ruddick, 1989)? We question maternal-demia and consider how academic work and motherwork can be synchronous. In creating a co-authored lexicon, we seek to find a way of performing what we found out through writing, language and speculative thinking.