This co-edited volume of biographical scholarly works illuminates the flexibility, depth and richness of biographical approaches as applied to mothering and motherhood internationally, highlighting the variety and scope of biographical research in yielding nuanced (and often concealed) aspects of mothers’ lives, which are shaped by labyrinthine factors that reflect the multidimensionality of mothers’ biographies. Drawing on empirical research from both minority and majority world contexts, the chapters presented in this book further reveal the richness of cultural expectations of motherhood that prevail in contemporary societies, which are both challenged and legitimised by the media, policies, governance cultures and religious beliefs. Significantly, we simultaneously underline and challenge the inherently static character of linear categorisations/dichotomies of mothering, which continue to prevail in contemporary literature. Importantly, empirical insights and the authors’ individual reflections further highlight tensions in policy-based narratives of mothering and motherhood, which are socially and culturally variable, both in and across time, place and contexts, while showing that underlying contradictions exist between cultural assumptions and narratives about mothering in policies and society that contrast with women's everyday experiences and lived situations in diverse social and political contexts. The book contributes markedly to extant, international biographical research on mothering and mothers’ lives, highlighting the complexity of mothering and motherhood as socially constructed, negotiated concepts and biographical processes, practices and lived experiences. The utilisation of lifecourse concepts in biographical research illuminates the dynamic nature of relationships between mothers and significant others, everyday ‘micro-level encounters’ (Winter et al, 2017), power dynamics in communities, and the contested nature of social imaginings of motherhood.

Furthermore, this book advances existing conceptual and empirical insights into mothers’ everyday lives, imagined futures and interconnecting past, present and future selves from a bottom-up perspective in the following ways:

• • by examining dynamic interconnections in diverse mothers’ experiences;

• • by identifying areas of confluence and convergence in mothering practices and the multiple (and interconnecting) narrative positionalities of mothers themselves that are both informed and shaped by powerful social expectations both in and across time;

• • by challenging stereotypes and assumptions about what constitutes ‘successful’ and ‘failed’ mothering that prevail in and across multiple cultural contexts, and challenging the predominantly static dichotomous approaches to mothering, revealing instead the heterogeneity and highly contextual nature of mothering and motherhood;

• • by illustrating the multidimensionality of mothers’ agency, individualisation and decision-making in specific contexts;