Shaantanu Kulkarni, MSc
Shaantanu earned a 2024/2025 CROSH Scholarship.
Thesis Title: “Exploring Media Stories and Narratives in Elite Athlete Motherhood: Synthesis and Self-Portrayals”
Shaantanu is doing his PhD in Human Kinetics. The central aims of his dissertation are to: 1. provide a foundation for media work on motherhood and elite sport that identifies key descriptive features of the shared findings from previous research, and builds on this literature by constructing new narrative themes; 2. examine professional curler mothers’ self-representations regarding sense of community meanings on Instagram after their return to sport, how different sense of community practices are performed, and investigate their implications for the big story narrative.
In study one, he critically explored published media studies on elite athlete mothers (Kulkarni et al., 2024) to summarize the collective findings from the included 15 studies and construct new interpretive knowledge via two narrative themes. From this meta-synthesis some recommendations were made, grounded in the two new narratives of entitlement to impose and maternal activism and the new ethic of care. The relevant ones were to focus on interrogating the relational framing and meanings of motherhood (e.g. belongingness/sense of community) in (team) sport contexts linked to progressive and compatibility related media narratives.
The second study investigated the Instagram visual posts of four Canadian elite curler mothers (Rachel Homan, Kaitlyn Lawes, Jocelyn Peterman, Sarah Wilkes) to understand more about the sense of community meanings and their associations with social change in facilitating the co-existence of motherhood in elite sport cultures, specifically curling. He used a big and small story approach tied to a dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) grounded in relativist narrative inquiry to understand the processes (i.e. how) behind the self-portrayals of belongingness meanings, and their career and life related implications for the curler mothers.
