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Image by Mauricio Artieda

Bio

Metropolitan University, B.A. & M.A.

Université Catholique de Lille, M.A.

University of Vienna, Ph.D. 

Marmara University, Ph.D.

University of Cambridge , ELT 

University of Sheffield , Teacher Trainer in ELT

My research interests include feminist theology, transnational migration, and critical communication studies.

My latest book is now available in the collections of UC Irvine Libraries, NYU Libraries, and the University of Toronto Press!

Front Cover PNG_edited_edited_edited.jpg
Image by geissht

Transnational Motherhood as Mission
2027

This study reconceptualizes transnational motherhood, with particular focus on missionary motherhood, as a process of re-territorializing maternal affect, understood as sustained gendered labor through which emotional and moral substance of motherhood is continuously relocated across spatial, temporal, technological, and relational configurations shaped by cross-border separation and institutional mobility. Rather than treating motherhood as a stable identity maintained at a distance, it conceptualizes it as an ongoing formation produced through uneven relations of power, care, and obligation in transnational and missionary contexts. Based on in-depth narrative interviews with six missionary mothers from diverse national backgrounds and migration trajectories, the analysis examines how maternal subjectivities are formed through everyday practices of childrearing, religious vocation, and cross-border mobility, with attention to institutional, moral, and spatial constraints of missionary life. It traces how affective dimensions of motherhood—love, longing, and responsibility—are reconfigured through mediated communication technologies such as phone calls and video communication, material exchanges including remittances and gifts, embodied experiences such as pregnancy and psychosomatic strain, and transnational kinship arrangements in which caregiving is redistributed to grandparents and extended family members. Findings show maternal labor in missionary transnational contexts is structured by persistent gendered asymmetries positioning women as primary carriers of emotional, relational, and reproductive responsibility, even where caregiving is formally shared. These asymmetries are reinforced through spousal dynamics, institutional expectations, and embodied constraints of mobility and reproduction. The study argues re-territorialization is not a singular adjustment or emotional response, but an ongoing embedded form of reproductive labor that remains unrecognized.

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