Maternal Ethics Certification Program

The Mothering Futures® Regenerative Maternal Ethics© Certification Program

FORTHCOMING 2025

While postmaternal post-humanist ideas and initiatives attempt to hack the crucial role of mothering out of its (r)evolutionary position in human becoming, the MĀTER program explores regeneration and sustainability within and through mothering to counter contemporary delusions of motherlessness.

Today, several distinct fields of ethics exist to reflect on freedom, responsibility, and justice. These include liberal ethics, feminist ethics, care ethics, queer ethics, emergent post-humanist ethics, and more. Until now, there has been no coherent field of distinctly maternal ethics. Isn’t it about time?

When searching for a program of study that centered maternal experience and knowledge as a graduate researcher, I found that no such program existed. Though my interdisciplinary insights and interests were welcomed and valued by peers and professors on broader topics to include ecology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and human development, I repeatedly encountered taboos when discussing the “missing mother”. I also met resistance when writing about bodyful maternal experience in rich and complex context beyond popular academic notions about mothering as just “oppressive”, “normative”, or “essentialist”. The well-trodden trails of academia often tend bleak narratives and cynical assumptions about human beings and rarely associate lifecourse development and human potential with maternal and relational wellbeing or ecological integration.

I dreamed often of participating in a program in which I could learn and grow in a supportive community without an ongoing navigation of aversions to embodied and empowering maternal meaning-making. What drives this opposition to optimistic mothering narratives is something this program will explore in depth. The MĀTER program is for all who share dreams and visions about centering the wellbeing of mothers in regenerative future making. It is for those who understand that mothering is a crucial topic for participatory engagement and research, and that it is necessary to learn directly with and from mothers who view mothering more positively than is presently the norm - especially amongst academic intelligentsia.

Regenerative Maternal Ethics© explores our human capacity for empathy and relationality, examining the roots of these human qualities in birth, and in the quality of the mother child nexus. It pays close attention to the cosmologies, worldviews, and practices of families, cultures, and societies in which mothers are well-resourced and centered, and when mothering is revered for its crucial role and potentiality in society rather than for the sacrifices modern motherhood requires.  

As a post-doctoral researcher, I continue to address gaps between how maternal theories are presently articulated in the fields of philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, ecology, and human development and how maternal values and principles are enacted in thriving maternal contexts cross culturally and historically. I am committed to bringing separate fields of study together appreciatively, including some that aren’t known to mix well, to open a conversant co-creative process that holds potential to thicken, enrich, and synthesize a repertoire of resources for flourishing maternal futures. I hope you will join me for this deep MĀTER-ial journey, beginning in 2025! Stay tuned to my socials and Substack to learn more in late 2024.