Finding the Deep Story of Striving Parents

Date: Tuesday, January 13, 2025

Time: 1 PM - 2:30 PM

Location: Ellen Gee Room, AQ 5067, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby campus

*This is a hybrid event. To avail the zoom link, please register with us via 'Online Admission'.

About the Event:

This talk is about what Arlie Hochschild calls a “deep story” (2016, xi), one that “feels-as-if” it might be true. This deep story is about parents in Vancouver, BC striving to raise their kids to be agents of social change. After George Floyd was killed by police on May 25, 2020, parents in Canada bought books on anti-racist parenting. In Vancouver, staff at the Vancouver Public Library responded to a new demand from parents with Zoom workshops that explained how to talk about injustice with kids. Dr. Amanda Watson, logged in to several of these Zoom offerings, hoping to glean some sense of how-to-do-it-right through the earbuds while home with her kids during COVID-19 school closures.

In her own striving to be a good parent, Dr. Watson understood this turn to resources like books and workshops as symptomatic of seeking an answer to uncertainty in the information age: parents are anxious so they seek “security strategies” (Villalobos 2014) to make things feel better. But, in her interviews with 28 local parents in 2023, parents let her in on a more complicated cultural politics of parenting. Drawing on three of these interview exchanges in this talk, she describes encounters of parents earnestly striving that “feels-as-if” it might be true.

References:

Hochschild, Arlie. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press.

Villalobos, Ana. 2014. Motherload: Making It All Better In Insecure Times. University of California Press.

About Dr. Amanda D. Watson:

Amanda D. Watson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Associate Member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is interested in social reproduction and how people who do disproportionate shares of carework in their families and communities understand their activities and imagine alternative caring relations. She is working on a book about parenting in racial capitalism.