The UK has some of the lowest breastfeeding duration rates in the industrialised world. This paper considers women's experiences breastfeeding in public as a factor in breastfeeding duration. Research is based on an analysis of: 11 interviews and a 46-person survey of new mothers in Southampton, Hampshire; 180 postings about breastfeeding in public on UK parenting website mumsnet; and a patent application for a 'portable lactation module'. I analyse these data through an engagement with the work of cultural theorist Sara Ahmed to argue that the 'limits of sociability' in public space in the UK can be marked through affective practice. This paper makes three unique contributions to scholarship. First, it increases understanding regarding an issue of direct importance to health policy by filling a gap in knowledge about women's experiences breastfeeding outside the home in the UK. Second, it contributes to the field of health geography by showing how affective environments can constrain health-promoting behaviours. Third, it extends conceptual work in human geography more broadly through an analysis of the relationships between affect, embodiment and urban subjectivity.

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This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.

This papers considers some of the disparate emotional and affective resonances that breastfeeding can produce. Breastfeeding is the iconic symbol of succour and comfortgiving. It is associated with better health for babies as well as lower rates of post-natal depression for mothers (as well as other health benefits). Yet it can also be a source of both physical and psychic discomfort, with the variance in the emotional resonance breastfeeding produces being bound up with where it takes place a d the se se of hethe o ot breastfeeding is welcome in that locale. In this paper I begin by putting the UK s e lo rates of breastfeeding beyond the first weeks post-birth in an international context, then trace in broad outline the spatial variability in breastfeeding rates across the UK. I then o side o e s e pe ie es eastfeedi g i pu li through a combination of interviews, survey-work, participant observation, and 770 posts to the UK parenting website mumsnet. I take conceptual work forward by highlighting the role of strangers within breastfeeding asse lages to shape othe s e pe ie es and feelings about breastfeeding practice. Drawing on concepts of affective atmospheres (Anderson 2009), public comfort (Ahmed 2004 & 2010), and secret-keeping (Deleuze and Guattari 1998), I argue that o e s (often negative) affective experiences breastfeeding in public is a contributing factor in why breastfeeding rates in the UK are so low. Finally, I highlight some of the social and material changes that would be needed to make public space in the UK more breastfeeding-friendly.

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in women's participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and women's studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed.