The rise of social media has changed how we understand and enact relationships across our lives, including motherhood. The meanings and practices of mothering have been significantly impacted by the availability of communities found via forums, blogs, and sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as internet resources that function to inform maternal experience and self-concept (ex. motherhood websites, Pinterest, or YouTube). The village that now contributes to the mothering experience has grown exponentially, granting mothers access to interactional partners and knowledge never before available. This volume of works explores the impact of social media forms on our cultural understandings of motherhood and the ways that we communicate about the experience and practice of mothering.

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BettyAnn Martin is a narrative scholar interested in the reconstruction of experience through story, and the ways in which creative engagement with memory transforms individual consciousness. She graduated with an MA in English from McMaster University. She went on to complete a bachelor of education from Western, after which she began to teach and raise a family. She is currently enjoying a long hiatus from teaching, but continues to participate in the growth and education of her five children. She returned to academia in 2012, and recently completed a PhD in Educational Sustainability from Nipissing University. In addition to several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, her most recent publication is a co-edited book entitled Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood and Social Media (2016). Through her own experiences of mothering and through a growing literature theorizing motherhood, BettyAnn continues to research and write about motherhood and its implications for identity. She currently resides in Brantford Ontario, with her husband and three school-aged children. Contact: thenarrativeconnection@gmail.com

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