World Childless Week 2024: Free webinar recording
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WCW2024 WEBINAR: Constructing Worthiness – An intimate conversation between Gayle Letherby and Sarah Roberts
WEBINAR SYNOPSIS
Dear Listener,
We hope you are well and welcome you to our webinar for World Childless Week 2024: Constructing worthiness – an intimate conversation
Involuntary childlessness is a personal, social and cultural experience and the way it unfolds in our lives can feel devaluing. We might not feel supported in both our heartbreak and thriving; nor feel welcome, safe or connected in relational spaces; and we can be disenfranchised or stigmatised in cultural, economic and political spheres.
Unworthiness and shame can develop when our experiences are not met well and can be exacerbated by previous wounding. The antidotes to these can include empathy and compassion, a critical perspective and an empowered voice.
This webinar is an intimate conversation with Professor Gayle Letherby about her lived experience and decades as a pioneering voice, groundbreaking researcher, creative writer and public intellectual for the childless-not-by-choice experience.
It is an opportunity to engage with Gayle about her work in empowering childless voices, engaging creatively to deconstruct the experience and the impact of involuntary childlessness, and to foster change.
Together we’d like to welcome you to our webinar, and invite you to reach out to either of us if you’d like to connect further. Thank you for taking the time to be part of this conversation about constructing worthiness.
Warmly
Sarah & Gayle
worldchildlessweek.net
Click the button below if you would prefer to read the article on the World Childless Week website as opposed to watching the video above.
ABOUT GAYLE LETHERBY
From the 1990’s, Gayle has been a pioneering lived experience, childless-not-by-choice, feminist scholar. Gayle’s work explores both the childless and permanent involuntary childless experience, and touches on so much more.
Gayle was one of the first scholars to articulate the continuum of childless and childfree, to name the caricatures used to describe childless women and non-parents, (bereft, desperate, selfish, pitiable), and challenges the language that can infantilize us as failing to mature. And that’s just the start.
Gayle’s scholarship has been cited in over 7000 academic publications, including in the work of current CNBC scholars. In short, Gayle’s work is important, and it’s very much worth listening to her pioneering voice. IMHO, if there were a living matriarch for the modern childlessness movement, it would probably be Gayle Letherby.
In conclusion, we’d like to thank Gayle for her pioneering work, and from all of us who have tended to broken dreams of never meeting our children, who have carried the grief, isolation, and social stigma of being childless not by choice, and who are exploring the possibilities for life now.
Thank you for breaking the silence, the shame and for being a wise role model for us all. Thank you.
Biography - Gayle Letherby
I am Visiting Professor at the Universities of Plymouth, Greenwich and Bath (specifically here within the Centre for Death and Society (CDAS)). Alongside substantive interests in the meanings and experiences of love, reproductive and non/parental (especially non/mother) identities; gender, health and wellbeing; death, loss and bereavement; travel and transport mobility; gender and identity within institutions; and solitude I have always been fascinated by research methodology, including auto/biographical, feminist and creative practices.
In recent years I have become interested in writing sociologically for non-academic audiences and creative writing within academic work. For more on this see www.gayle-letherby.co.uk And for some examples of different sorts of writing, including fiction on memoir, see https://www.abctales.com/user/gletherby Gayle Letherby's Blog (arwenackcreatives.blogspot.com) I have researched and written academically about the identity and experience of those who mother (and father) and those who do not for 35 years and much of my creative writing also engages with this issue.
Biography - Sarah Roberts
I am a counsellor, lived experience advocate and founder of the Empty Cradle, a counselling and support service for women transitioning to permanent involuntary childlessness. I’m honoured to be a World Childless Week Ambassador and licensed Gateway Reignite Facilitator in the Asia/Pacific Region. My background is over 35 years in counselling, community education and professional training, with an academic interest in the grief and transition to permanent involuntary childlessness, and the flourishing of older childless women.
For over a decade, I have been a public advocacy voice for women’s involuntary childless experiences, both following infertility and by circumstances. This has included media work, presentations at fertility conferences, training for the fertility sector on the psychological impact of long-term treatment, ending fertility treatment and the transition to permanent involuntary childlessness. Recently I was a witness at an Australian Senate Inquiry Hearing about the childless menopause and the social policy needs of involuntary childless Australians.
INVOLUNTARY CHILDLESS SCHOLARSHIP
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READ THE ARTICLE:
PATRIARCHAL MOTHERHOOD
How it divides women and damages friendships.
READ THE ARTICLE:
Some foundations of feminist scholarship into motherhood and non-motherhood
Whether by-choice, not-by-choice, or somewhere-in-between.
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World Childless Week 2024: Free webinar recording
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