Ph.D-Dissertation-Notice: Michala Hvidt Breengaard

The dissertation investigates practices of mothering in contemporary Beijing. The analysis departs in qualitative interviews with well-educated Chinese mothers as well as breastfeeding advocates. Through a narrative approach, the dissertation explores formations of maternal subjectivity and norms of childcare in a society marked by the one-child policy and the request of 'quality children'. It shows how discourses on quality children and mothering unfold on an everyday level, the conflicts and negotiations that mothers meet and do in their daily life, the ideals that they strive for and how they clash with their actual family arrangements. In close dialogue with the empirical stories, the dissertation continuously discusses how to understand subjectivity as changeable as well as the implications of working with an unstable subject in empirical studies.