AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace proposed that the activities involved in mothering children facilitated a distinct mode of thought that she termed ‘maternal thinking’. In this paper, I examine my experience of becoming a mother and how it influenced my scholarly work. Maternity did not hinder my intellectual life; I experienced an explosion of intellectual energy that I found was facilitated by my maternity in ways like those theorised by Ruddick. However, I experienced a simultaneous feeling of becoming invisible to the academy (beyond a network of feminist colleagues), which was compounded by my status as an early-career and casually employed academic. Rather than my new role as mother limiting my career, the constraints of the university seemed to push my maternal self (and its rhythm of inquiry) out of its walls, and I find myself now remaining a scholar as a mother despite the institution. Here, I frame my own maternal thinking as ‘slow philosophy’, following Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, to make sense of this incongruence. I argue that framing maternal thinking as slow philosophy helps further illuminate the marginal position that women occupy in relation to the academy.