Transitions to Lone Motherhood and Practices of Resistance: Early Findings from a Study in Four European Countries

The Study on TRansition and Exclusion in Society of Single-Mums (STRESSMums) adopts the sociological approach of Institutional Ethnography (IE) and it collects data in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and in the UK through discursive interviews to lone mothers, judicial professionals, and gender issues activists, participant observations, and photo-voice sessions involving mothers and professionals.

The interest of the research study is about the lone mothers’ everyday strategies and social practices to claim inclusion and to negotiate or not negotiate, on the one hand, the dominant definition of family and parenthood proposed by institutions and professionals, and, on the other hand, the less legitimated and multiple situated definitions proposed by lone parents and embodied by their families. The analysis takes into consideration the transition from double parenthood to lone motherhood, in particular paying attention to the period of judicial evaluation for child custody and judicial decisions for allowances and other obligations. This paper presents the early findings of this research study; in particular, it considers the interviews involving single mothers as participants. Beginning from the mothers’ standpoint, the paper analyses the mothers’ specific modes of knowledge to coordinate their actions during that period of transition and evaluation. It discusses the text-mediated discursive practices that define family and parenthood as embodied know-how and perception, the ruling relations that shape the local experiences of mothers’ everyday lives, and their forms and practices of resistance to the normatively organized conception of family.

This research project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no 843976.