"Now, I'm magazine detective the whole time": Listening and responding to young people's complex experiences of popular physical culture

Popular physical culture serves as a site, subject and medium for young people's learning (Sandford & Rich, 2006) and impacts their relationship with physical education, physical activity and the construction of their embodied identities. This paper addresses the potential of scrapbooking as a pedagogical and methodological tool to facilitate physical education researchers and teachers to listen to, and better understand and respond to extend students' existing knowledge of, and critical engagement with popular physical culture. The data draws from a three year Participatory Action Research project that was undertaken in an urban, secondary school and was designed to engage 41 girls (aged 15-19) in understanding, critiquing and transforming aspects of their lives that influenced their perspectives of their bodies and their physical activity and physical education engagement. In this paper the focus is on the engagement of eleven of these girls in a five week popular physical culture unit. The students' scrapbooks, audio-recordings of classes, a guided conversation, and field notes constitute the data sources. Findings suggest scrapbooking has the potential to allow researchers access, understand and respond to students' perspectives on popular physical culture and their lives in a way that other methods may not. Pedagogically, scrapbooking supported students in critically appraising and making meaning of "scraps" of popular physical culture

Letters from early career academics: the physical education and sport pedagogy field of play

Taking our lead from Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1929) ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, our broader project aimed to create a space for dialogue and intergenerational learning between Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (PESP) Early Career Academics (ECAs) and members of the PESP professoriate. This paper focuses specifically on the experiences of PESP ECAs. We draw upon narratives of thirty ECAs from nine different countries to gain insight into the experiences, joys, challenges and ambitions they associate with being and becoming a PESP academic. A narrative analysis of the data generated by the ECAs was undertaken. The analysis aimed to be holistic in nature, interested in form and content: both the told (the content) and the telling (how it was told). We initially focused our analysis using the six dimensions of narrative (characters, setting, events, audience, causal relations and themes). Bourdieu’s socio-analytical toolkit complemented our narrative analysis and helped us move beyond the personal narratives by linking them to the broader social practices, relations and structures of the various settings or fields (PESP, university, family) within which the participants function. The findings suggest that many ECAs are experiencing crises of habitus, as they work to suppress ethical dispositions and values and adjust to ‘the rules’ that universities increasingly play by. Our discussion engages with the affective costs of playing by these rules, and recruits Bourdieu’s notion of ‘reflexive vigilance’ to advocate for ongoing critical analysis of how power operates in the various field which academics inhabit

The earth sciences in the scientific letters of Giovanni Capellini

Giovanni Capellini (1833-1922) was one of the leading representatives of the Italian and international scientific community from the mid-19th century until 1922, the year of his death. Professor of Geology at the University of Bologna from 1860, geologist, palaeontologist and archaeologist, in 1871 he organised, straight after the unification of Italy, the 5th International Congress in Archaeology and Prehistoric Anthropology, first in Italy, and in 1881 brought to Bologna, for the first time ever in Italy, the 2nd International Geological Congress. His studies and publications strongly influenced the geological thinking of his times. At the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna there are as many as 30,000 documents from his scientific letters (The Capellini Archive), the result of an intense correspondence he had with geologists, seismologists, astronomers and meteorologists, but also with people from the world of culture and politics. The letters relating to the earth sciences, from scientific but also political point of view, are the majority. The archive includes letters from more then 4,300 senders, of which at least 25% foreign ones incuding Charles Lyell (geologist), Emmanuel Friedlaender (volcanologist), Philip Eduard De Verneuil (naturalist), Henry James Johnston Lavis (volcanologist)

Researching up and across in physical education and sport pedagogy: methodological lessons learned from an intergenerational narrative inquiry

Of issue in this paper are the ways in which different forms of narrative may be of value in undertaking research in potentially thorny situations. The project that inspired this paper saw 30 Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (PESP) Early Career Academics (ECAs) from more than 20 universities across Australasia, North America and Europe, provide narrative accounts of their ongoing academic experiences. From these stories, three letters seeking advice and guidance from leaders in the field were constructed. Following further feedback from the ECAs, the 3 letters were sent to 11 professors in the PESP field with a request to respond, also in letter form. The composite letters and the professorial responses were then the subject of a symposium at an international PESP conference. While the larger project engages with questions of being and becoming an academic in the neoliberal university, this paper is primarily concerned with methodological issues, including our steps and missteps with narrative, inquiry and the field. More specifically, the focus is on narrative as both the method and phenomena of study. As such, we consider issues associated with using dialogue as data, the provocation of participants, as well as both the presentation and representation of data and the relative power of the participants. In doing so, we critically engage with issues of anonymity (or lack thereof), the practice of ‘researching up’ and finally reach the conclusion that the careful approach to data generation, treatment and presentation necessitated by this project, should be a more regular feature of all qualitative inquiry

‘Letters to an early career academic’: learning from the advice of the physical education and sport pedagogy professoriate

Taking our lead from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, this project represents our attempt to stimulate dialogue between 30 physical education and sport pedagogy (PESP) early career academics (ECAs) and 11 PESP professors. First, the ECAs were invited to write a narrative around their experiences as PESP ECAs. Second, a narrative analysis was undertaken and three composite ECA letters were constructed. Third, these letters were shared with the professoriate, who were each invited to write a letter of response. Finally, six of the professors participated in a symposium, which focused on the letters. The professors’ letters and the transcripts of the symposium constitute the dataset for this paper. While the larger project engages with ECA voices this paper focuses on how the professors construct the university and PESP and the implications of these constructions for how they advise and mentor ECAs. Theoretically, we recruit the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and nascent ideas about mentoring, to challenge our interpretive complacency, and help us think in generative ways about the data. Our analysis engages with three broad themes: constructions of the university; constructions of PESP; and constructions of self. Findings suggest that while much of the professorial advice might be interpreted as targeted towards the development of more accomplished neoliberal subjects, there was some evidence of a more radical, collegial mentoring of sorts, through advice that foregrounded strategies of resistance

‘It has really amazed me what my body can now do’: boundary work and the construction of a body-positive dance community

Boundaries around normative embodiments in physical cultures can be exclusionary if one’s embodied identity does not ‘fit’. Normative boundaries are particularly marked in codified forms of dance such as ballet. Moves towards body positivity aim to challenge these normative boundaries by redefining what dancers’ bodies can look like and how they should move. This paper stems from an appreciative inquiry undertaken with one such project, a gender-neutral, LGBTQ-friendly adult ballet school in the UK; a subcultural context that marks itself as distinct from broader cultures of dance. Interviews with learners are analysed through a Bourdieuian lens to explore the construction and maintenance of a body-positive subculture. Findings suggest that boundaries of ability were crossed, with celebration of all bodies’ capabilities, and boundaries of normative gender expression were transformed through a commitment to gender-neutrality and LGBTQ-friendly behaviours. However, boundaries around technical and aesthetic norms, while shifted or challenged, ultimately remained in place

Girls’ presentations of self in physical culture: a consideration of why physical activity is not always the answer

It is assumed that sport is a good thing and if a population does not have equitable access or indeed are seen not to take advantage of available opportunities to be physically active, there is a problem. Girls’ non- and dis-engagement from physical activity and sport has been particularly well documented. Historically, girls have been constructed as ‘the problem’ and blamed for not engaging. Drawing on data from the beginning phase of a three-year participatory action research project with Irish, working class, female teenagers, this chapter asks readers to consider contexts within which sport for all is not the primary answer but rather a secondary and partial response to inequity. Data for this chapter were primarily generated through a photovoice activity, which saw participants take and discuss images of the place and space of physical activity in their lives. I recruit Goffman’s (The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Random House, 1959) dramaturgical framework to think about how participants’ social identities and physicalities are constituted in and through the micro-practices their bodies perform in everyday spaces, and examine how and why participants have come to devalue sport and physical activity. Findings illustrate the nature and complexity of participants’ (ethnic/gendered/classed) experiences of inclusion and exclusion in, and rejection and acceptance of sport for all (and related) discourses