Dr Maud M Perrier

My current research is concerned with care workers’ labour movements and advancing feminist debates around childcare, motherhood and social reproduction. My latest book Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction (2022) is the first comparative study of childcare movements and develops a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities forged call ‘Maternal Worker Power’. My earlier research was concerned with challenging middle-class norms around reproductive timing, intensive mothering  and the stigmatization of teenage parenthood during New Labour and Austerity Britain.  

Theoretically my research has contributed to a variety of debates including emotional and cultural capital (2013), affect and relationality in feminist activism (2015, 2016) changed analyses of the relationship between neoliberalism and feminism (2015, 16, 17). More recently, I have contributed to social reproduction theory  and argued for a dual terrains approach that refuses to hierarchize  waged and unwaged work (2021, 2022).

In June 2019 I co-curated with Junko Yamashita and Alice Tatton Brown an exhibition called ‘Care and Control’ in a vacant shop in a city centre mall. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s ‘Selfcare as warfare’ and Sara Ahmed’s ‘killjoy survival kit’, the exhibition brought together an assembly of feminist objects and images borrowed from two generations of feminist activists, peers and from the Feminist Archive South. Visitors were asked to think through objects about what is it we are being asked to survive, and how we can be part of each others’ survival.

I have held visiting researcher positions at the University of Western Australia (2014), the University of Technology Sydney (2016) and the University of York in Toronto (2020).

I am a member of the Editorial Boards of Sociological Review and Feminist Theory.