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Reflexive Methodologies: An autoethnography of the gendered performance of sport/management
Abstract
Autoethnography has emerged as a relatively new methodological approach within the fields of leisure, sport and tourism studies and more broadly within the social sciences. As a reflexive methodology it offers the beginning and experienced researcher a means of critically exploring the social forces that have shaped their own involvement in leisure practices and subsequent professional careers. In this article we discuss the significance of autoethnography as it was utilised by the first author in her student research on women's participation in cricket and the management dilemmas within this sport. The process involved recollecting, writing and re-reading experiences in light of feminist theories that explore the performance of gender through sport. The second author's involvement in the project is discussed in terms of the relational, supervisory context that can foster writing of the self into research within honours and post-graduate programs. In this way the writing practices that mediate knowledge produced about leisure or sport are made transparent and foregrounded within the research process itself. The autoethnographic approach used in this article contributes to the emergent methodological literature that embraces the textual or narrative turn within qualitative studies of leisure and sport. Yes Yes
... However, we argue that these criticisms overlook its value, particularly its ability to reveal critical insider insights into the culture of sporting organisations. For example, Fleming and Fullagar (2007) drew from the experience of being a player, coach and facility manager of cricket to explore how women constantly have to negotiate gender and power relations. They offer a rich, descriptive and honest account of the personal challenges and dilemmas experienced being involved in a sport historically considered a masculine pursuit and professional domain (Fleming and Fullagar, 2007). ...
... For example, Fleming and Fullagar (2007) drew from the experience of being a player, coach and facility manager of cricket to explore how women constantly have to negotiate gender and power relations. They offer a rich, descriptive and honest account of the personal challenges and dilemmas experienced being involved in a sport historically considered a masculine pursuit and professional domain (Fleming and Fullagar, 2007). ...
This chapter explores the benefits of adopting ethnographic methods when studying sports fandom. In a field largely dominated by quantitative analysis and fan typologies, the authors argue that through the use of ethnographic research methods a more holistic viewpoint emerges that provides deeper insights that cannot be captured though more traditional survey-based methods alone. The chapter begins by first describing what ethnography and autoethnography are, and then their application to studying sport fans. Drawing on two case studies, it applies this understanding to demonstrate the value of the ethnographic approach to gain a deeper insight into sport fandom
... Increasingly collaborative approaches are offered as a means of overcoming some of these challenges (Winkler 2018). Whilst collaborative autoethnography 1 has emerged as a means of overcoming these ethical and practical challenges (Lapadat 2017;Chang 2013), instead we drew upon recommendations offered by Winkler (2018) and work conducted by Fleming and Fullagar (2007) to work collaboratively to offer an interpretation of the sole autoethnographic accounts of the first author. ...
... Ultimately then, the second author is more of a story analyst than a storyteller (Smith and Sparkes 2008), but in a sense contributed to shaping the story -what and how it was told -via the reflexive writing process. Similar methodological processes have taken place in Fleming and Fullagar (2007) work on women's experiences of cricket participation and management, both of whom conclude this collaborative process of analysing autoethnographic accounts supports telling important and lesser heard stories, particularly in novice autoethnographers. ...
Those with physical disabilities are at increased risk of poor physical, mental and social health. Despite widely reported physiological and psychosocial benefits of sport for disabled people’s health and wellbeing, participation remains low and is in decline. Subsequently, we answer calls for greater focus on individuals’ voices to understand the complexities of disabled people’s participation in sport. Through a narrative autoethnographic approach we critically show and examine the lived experiences of a young female sportswoman with a disability (Gemma), as she reflects on the role of sport in, through and beyond her childhood. Framed within Arthur Frank’s narratives of injury and illness, we highlight the sport-based posthumanist narrative(s) that enabled Gemma’s (re)construction of a healthy self. Ultimately, we offer narrative inquiry, including autoethnographic methods, as a framework for understanding the lived experiences of children and young people with physical disabilities and practical recommendations for expanding narrative resources.
• Points of interest
• Despite the barriers to and benefits of sport and exercise for children and young with a disability, the number who participate remains low and is in decline.
• This research examines stories from a young woman with cerebral palsy as she reflects on the role of sport in and beyond her childhood.
• She views her participation in sport as a turning point in her life when she was struggling to work out who she was and what she could be in the world.
• Sport has enabled her to make sense of who she was, who she is and who she can be and has therefore supported her health and wellbeing.
• These types of stories can be used to support other young people with similar health and wellbeing issues.
... involved the author and fifteen students. As such, the research was reflexive, ethnographic, and anecdotal (Fleming and Fullagar 2007;Dupuis 1999;Gergen and Gergen 1991;den Outer, Handley, and Price 2013;Koballa 1986). These processes identified the initial (unfiltered and unbiased) impressions of the immediate users of the new platform. ...
This paper highlights disruptions to traditional learning environments in the Trinidad and Tobago educational system during the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines issues due to social distancing restrictions as well as strategies using digital integrations to achieve educational continuity. This research focused on a case study of a lecturer’s experience in educational digital transformation using Google Classroom. It was done through direct observations of each student’s response to changes in the educational platform and style of learning. This involved administration of ad hoc openended unstructured qualitative questions to students during the transition. The students’ feedback identified thematic areas (of digital well-being, digital transformation, and online platform access) that were used in a scoping literature review using Google Scholar. The effect of transitioning from the physical classroom to an online platform revealed that the majority of students were able to access the system with limited disruption. Practical implications of this experiential case study would be the application of the developmental elements of the digital transformation policy. This involved the identification of a best practice approach. This achieved four pillars of Industry 4.0 benefits, and also identified the use of interactive elements as extended reality (AR, VR, MR) and haptic technologies for STEAM focused courses. The value of the paper is in the detailed use of the Google platform and provision of a solution for easier integration of remote applications to enable a faster migration to alternate teaching modalities.
... In Frank's (2013) terms, Fanny's figure skating story as a semiotic material companion began to cause trouble in her life. For Carly and Natalie, the research generated insight into what it means to co-author a student's narrative of self (Fleming & Fullagar, 2007), and one which troubled our roles and responsibilties as supervisors and co-authors, an issue we will turn to towards the end of this article. ...
Coaches have been shown to detriment athletes’ health, well-being and development. Knowledge of this long-term effect and what it means for athletes to live with such stories is under-explored. Using self-narrative, we examine the long-lasting impact of the coach-athlete relationship in the stories of aformer figure skater, Fanny. Guided by Arthur Frank’s dialogical analysis, we present creative non-fictional stories to show how Fanny made sense of her figure skating experiences, which were framed by asport investment narrative and a career-wrecking injury that terminated her dream of becoming aprofessional figure skater. We suggest that if handled as an act of self-care, storytelling can re-configure the dominant coach-athlete relationship and sport investment narrative and help athletes to understand and reconstruct their stories. Finally, we reflect upon the impact of Fanny’s story on her advisers and consider the pedagogical implications of such narrative work in sport coaching and sport education.
The purpose of this paper is to explore how people’s differentiated privileged and marginalised positions in society create instances of inclusion and exclusion in tourism. Eight authors utilised their diverse disciplinary and theoretical bases to engage in individual autoethnography and collaborative reflections of their personal experiences of being tourists and hosts. Through our Western and non-Western, White and non-White experiences, we reveal experiences from a multitude of perspectives, and problematise the dominant White racial frame. The methodology illustrates unquestioned privileges and feelings of discomfort when personally faced with exclusionary practices and creates an understanding of how individuals have different experiences of enchantment and the tourist gaze. The experience of marginalisation is serial and dialectical, which illustrates the complexity of tourism. The paper contributes to an enhanced and multifaceted understanding of tourism experiences and proposes measures to reveal issues of exclusion. Also, the use of autoethnography and collaborative reflection as methodological tools provide opportunities for researchers and practitioners to engage in reflexive conversation on discriminatory practices, and how they hinder certain individuals and groups from enjoying tourism products and services. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This paper proposes autoethnography as a novel form of management education. Autoethnography is a different way of researching, writing and learning, all inextricably linked. It enables the researcher/learner to turn the lens on their own self and consider their management/human resource development (HRD) practice – whether in the classroom or staffroom. Autoethnography enables both personal learning and contribution to sociological understanding in the local context, thus transcends dominant Western thinking. This offers an indigenous form of learning, and thus is especially pertinent to HRD in any international context. Writing about self both requires and fosters greater critical reflection, reflexivity, and ethical consideration. To demonstrate this, I make two contributions. First, I share and reflect on my own pedagogic experiences to illustrate some of the benefits – and risks – of autoethnography. In doing so, I expose some of the challenges for both students and staff from my local experiences. Second, to address these, I propose a model for more carefully and creatively incorporating critical reflecting and writing skills to develop autoethnography in the management/HRD curriculum to enable more meaningful learning to ‘fit’ both the learner and their local culture.
Parents are central stakeholders within the youth sport context, yet their own health and well-being can be compromised due to the extensive commitment required to support their child’s sport development. Against a backdrop of transformative sport service research and eudaimonic well-being, the study presents an autoethnography of my experience as a parent attempting to subvert the traditional role of parent–spectator by engaging in “sideline” physical activity simultaneous to my child’s sport. A secondary purpose is to identify the program and facility design attributes within the community sport environment that facilitate or inhibit the well-being of parents via simultaneous participation. This study highlights how the lines between researcher and subject can be blurred to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and strengthen well-being through mastery, autonomy, personal growth, interpersonal relations, and self-acceptance. Through lived experience and personal voice, I hope that my story will open new possibilities for transformative practices within community sport.
In this article we analyze images of sportswomen from four media outlets over the course of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia. Through visual discourse analysis we find that despite structural changes to increase gender equality at the Commonwealth Games—which for the first time ensured equal opportunities for men and women to win medals—sportswomen were still depicted in a very narrow way, and intersectional representations were mainly excluded. Though the quantity of images of women had increased, the ‘quality’ of these images was poor in terms of representing sportswomen in their diversity. We still have far to go if we are to embrace women in their multiplicity—and to recognize that women can be strong, capable, butch, femme, and varied in their range of expressions of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
A variety of qualitative approaches – underlined by diverse postpositivist, postmodern, poststructuralist, and interdisciplinary perspectives – are employed by scholar’s in the field of leisure studies that influence the use of non-traditional qualitative methodologies. In this article, we discuss why novice researchers (such as graduate students or neophyte researchers) studying leisure contexts should engage in and build a legacy of utilizing non-traditional methodologies within their research. We provide a brief review of literature and an overview of our own experience conducting research utilizing (1) the methodological bricolage; and (2) autoethnography. We discuss our experiences of two novice researchers in the field of leisure who utilized non-traditional qualitative methodologies, and, building on contributions from scholars in the field of leisure who have advocated for a diversification and robust knowledge base, discuss and advocate for the use of non-traditional research approaches in leisure studies as something to be celebrated by inquiring, novice researchers. We conclude by suggesting that building a legacy of engaging in non-traditional methodologies by novice researchers offers potential to contribute to the dynamic and reflexive field of leisure.
According to Paton, sport management research went through several phases up to the 1990s: a praxis phase, based upon "administrative principles, usually developed by authorities in the field, and upon program planning in physical education"; a second more theory-based phase that continues to the present; and a third descriptive phase (Paton, 1987, p. 26). In most of this research, however, the use of methodological innovation in research and in reporting research has been relatively scarce (as in many of the subdisciplines in physical education/kinesiology). In the present article, I argue for the use of personal narrative and personal storytelling in sport management research methodology, which might result in the asking of different questions and in write-ups that could serve to invigorate sport management studies. This method of research answers different, interactionist-based questions for researchers delving into how sport management affects people and how sport managers interact with others. In other words, this method examines how lives are lived into existence, and it provides models for practitioners and scholars of sport management to model, discover, experience, and use.
This paper examines three approaches to the analysis of women's leisure, and discusses ways in which the ideas and concepts from these different approaches can be integrated. The first and dominant approach to understanding women's leisure is analysis of how leisure is constrained. From this perspective leisure is conceptualized as a desirable experience, and constraints to leisure participation are seen to arise out of structured gender relations. The second approach focuses on how leisure activities themselves, especially stereotypical activities, can be constraining through the reinforcement of traditional gender relations. A third, emerging approach examines ways in which women's leisure can be seen to have the potential for resistance to societally imposed constraints. Some guiding principles are suggested for the integration of these three approaches into a broader conceptual framework. Such a framework allows for both the diversity of women's experiences, and the contradictions inherent in women's leisure, to be taken into account.
This article aims toward developing a critical theory that can further advance feminist research in sport management. I seek to offer a critical analysis of gender relations in sport and leisure management by developing a theoretical critique of gender (in)equity that integrates both social theory and cultural analyses. The original empirical data was gathered in a national study of Gender Equity in Leisure Management conducted by the author in 1998/99 and secondary data was drawn from comparative studies undertaken in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. (Aitchison, Brackenridge, & Jordan, 1999; Henderson & Bialeschki, 1993, 1995; Mckay, 1996; Shinew & Arnold, 1998). The research cited demonstrates that women's experience of sport and leisure management is shaped by both structural and cultural factors. My findings highlight the need for new epistemological perspectives as much as new methodological approaches and techniques. This new perspective acknowledges the complexities of gender-power relations in the workplace and recognizes the interconnectedness and mutually informing nature of structural and cultural power, thus opening the way for more sophisticated analyses and understandings of gender equity in sport and leisure management.
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