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Coming to Life: New Book from Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline Lundquist


Sarah LaChance Adams (UO PhD, 2011) and Caroline Lundquist (UO PhD Candidate) have published an edited collection, Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering, with Fordham University Press.

In Coming to Life, 16 authors— including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars— engage in sustained reflections on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of convention philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical male thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume.

Read more about this volume at Oxford University Press:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/Women/?view=usa&ci=9780823244614

Sarah LaChance Adams is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Superior:
http://www.uwsuper.edu/acaddept/si/employees/sarah-lachance-adams_employee1330818

Caroline Lundquist is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/uophil/faculty/profiles/clundqui/