Creating Supportive Spaces for Pregnant and Parenting College Students

This volume brings together interdisciplinary research, theoretical perspectives, and detailed explanations of examples to help colleges become supportive spaces for pregnant and parenting students.

Expanding the discourse around pregnant and parenting college students to a more interdisciplinary and international arena, this volume follows the ground-breaking monograph Title IX and the Protection of Pregnant and Parenting College Students (Riley, Hutchinson, Dix 2022). The present volume defines this cohesive field and brings together separate voices to help colleges become supportive spaces. The chapters explore academia’s attitude toward motherhood, families, and carework, the invisibility of pregnant and parenting students, system-wide negligence, the forgotten nature of student-fathers, unacknowledged miscarriages, organized policy change efforts, involved agencies of change, the troubling presence of coercion, and more. While arguing that barriers currently prevent colleges from becoming supportive spaces, the volume asserts that improvements are both feasible and vital for ensuring that institutions of higher education are complying with Title IX, a U.S. federal law.

Offering interdisciplinary research, explanations of problems, and paths for progress, this edited volume will be useful to scholars, researchers, administrators, and activists working to support pregnant and parenting students. Various chapters will also interest those working in higher education administration, education policy, reproductive health, gender studies, and health and organizational communication more broadly. Supporting pregnant and parenting college students, however, is a shared responsibility belonging to all members of a campus community; accordingly, this volume is for every institution that plans to comply with Title IX.

Catherine L. Riley, PhD, is a former university professor and the owner of Supportive Space Consulting, LLC. This is her second book and was produced while parenting three young children and delivering her fourth child.

Katie B. Garner, PhD, is the Executive Director of the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship. Her publications span academic presses and mainstream outlets. Katie is the mother of three children.