I was delighted to be invited to present a breakout session about the Holding Time Project at the Breastfeeding Network Conference in London this month. The conference brought together many of the influential thinkers in the UK breastfeeding ‘scene’ and it was a great opportunity to hear presentations on science, policy, psychology and racism amongst others.
For this event I put together a slideshow, beginning with the story of my own struggles to breastfeed, then the rationale for the Holding Time still images, how these lead to the animation and installation. Finally I talked about the project website, the breastfeeding Hubs, the YouTube Channel interviews.
Putting the project into a concise one hour presentation, helped me consider the learnings I gave gained over the course of the project. I explored the imagery I was exposed to in childhood, in pregnancy and after the birth. I talked about how narrow the stereotype of a breastfeeding mother was, how little it portrayed of the variety of mothers, of ages of children, of moods and expressions on their faces.
I also wrote down many of the insights I had gained along the way, with titles like: Breastfeeding is a Feminist Issue because…and Normalizing Breastfeeding means….
If you’d like to listen to the talk, you can click on the link below. I will also be presenting this talk again at Liverpool University in a public seminar series in the School of Psychology on Friday June 26th 2020.
