Mothering, mentoring and journeys towards inspiring spaces

This paper concerns how care work in mothering is interconnected with caring academic praxis, and the ways in which processes across both (and their mutual co-construction) are gendered, raced and institutional. Hence, in this paper, we ask ourselves how transgressing professional and caring boundaries may inform us about how we 'do' geography while making practices and creating spaces that have enabled us to work and care for our children and families. We find that care normatively associated with mothering permeates our professional work, just as our professional work has shaped us as mothers. To us, doing geography means acknowledging this and involves a responsibility to develop mutual processes of teaching, research and mentoring along with strategies of care such as mothering. We acknowledge that our practices of mothering and mentoring are intertwined within structural and personal relations such as gender hierarchies, race and scholarly positioning. Our practices of mothering and mentoring have enabled us to negotiate conventional ontologies of private and professional spaces and trace what we term 'inspiring spaces' both within the academy and beyond.