Mentors and Influential Figures
Mentors have come in different forms throughout my career. Some appeared in formal roles, such as my MSc and PhD main supervisor, Susan Greendorfer, who ensured I was well-grounded in the history and recent developments in sociology of sport, and taught me fundamental research skills, including the importance of systematicity, detail, and the non-negotiability of accurate referencing. Sue also weathered and supported my unsettling and emotional shift from a positivist desire to learn the one right way to do research and then return home and apply it, to embracing fundamentally different ontologies and epistemologies in cultural studies and feminisms.
Other mentors came in the form of teachers, such as Syndy Sydnor and Norman Denzin, who fostered and validated different ways of representing research (e.g., Denzin, 1996; Kohn & Slowikowski, 1998; Sydnor, 1998) and introduced me to the work of C. Wright Mills and Laurel Richardson. Larry Grossberg provided a strong grounding in cultural studies (e.g., Grossberg, 1992, 1996) and introduced me to Stuart Hallâs writings, which have become the bedrock of my theoretical approach to, and interpretation of, sports media representations. All of them challenged me to think differently than I had before, and introduced me to concepts and ideas that I hold close, that act like points of light, orienting my research. For example, through Hallâs work (e.g., 1984, 1985, 1997a, 1997b; Hall, Evans, & Nixon, 2013) I came to understand that media stories teach us how to think about aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity, nationalism, and dis/ability, by establishing the boundaries within which we can think. I continue to find the cultural studies concept of articulation a particularly valuable way to make sense of some of the intractable discourses of difference that permeate sports media. My work attempting to challenge dominant discourses that marginalize, de-legitimate, and reduce groups to stereotypes is also firmly grounded in the belief that such articulations, discourses, and stories have real effects and affects on peopleâs lives and possibilities. I have long drawn inspiration from Richardsonâs belief that âstories that deviate from standard cultural plots provide new narrativesâ and that hearing such narratives âlegitimates replotting oneâs own lifeâ (1990, p. 26). For her, âThe story of the transformed life, then, becomes a part of the cultural heritage affecting future stories, future livesâ (Richardson, 1990, p. 26).
Other mentors came in the form of peers at the University of Illinois, Pirkko Markula, David Andrews, Nancy Spencer, Bob Rinehart, Jim Denison, Steve Jackson, Jeremy Howell, Lesley Fishwick, and others, with whom I spent many hours drinking beer or coffee as we debated the finer points of the theories and methods of sport sociology, cultural studies, postmodernism, and feminisms. In the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) I found an academic home, which exposed me to multiple perspectives, fierce debates, and senior academics who encouraged and supported graduate students. After moving back to New Zealand from the United States, the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) conferences became a second home and started me down the path of international collaborations, seeking patterns and differences in multiple cultural contexts (e.g., Bruce, 2016a; Bruce, Hovden, & Markula, 2010; see also Markula, 2009).
Beyond research, Norm Denzin embodied a form of teaching practise that I embrace, one that values the knowledge and experiences students bring to learning, recognizes and makes visible the tentative and limited nature of academic knowledge, and values debate and discussion, alongside immersion in personally relevant topics. Similarly, Vicky Paraschak and I have shared many 5:30 am morning walks at NASSS, discussing our shared philosophy of strengths-based, student-centered, teaching practise (e.g., Paraschak & Thompson, 2014).
Rather than unintentionally ignoring some of the many colleagues, supervisors, teachers, and peers whose words and ideas have helped me navigate my way into and through an academic career, I finish instead with a story. At a recent writing retreat, we were asked to imagine ourselves in a room facing a writing problem, then to imagine a knock at the door. Our task was to explain our problem to the writing mentor we found standing outside, who would give us the answer. Opening the door, I âsawâ Laurel Richardson and Norm Denzin holding hands, and together they said, âWrite from the heart.â I treasure these four powerful and inspirational words as a foundation upon which to build the rest of my research, writing, and teaching career.
Research Trajectory
Throughout my career, I have been engaged in what another mentor, journalist and writer Don Murray, called exploring âthe questions that itchâ our lives (Murray, 1991, p. 73). As with many researchers, my early questions emerged from my own biography (Richardson, 2001) as a female basketball player and sports journalist. I began with small-scale feminist and cultural studies-informed studies of various aspects of sports media, including women basketball fansâ experiences of watching televised coverage of womenâs games and women sportswritersâ experiences covering menâs college and professional sport. Since then my work has expanded into issues of mediated nationalism, masculinity, and dis/ability. The diversity of topics â gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, nationalism, and disability â is held together through my focus on the power of dominant cultural discourses to include or exclude, to reify or marginalize, and a desire to create spaces where silenced or marginalized voices and experiences can be heard.
Right now, I am trying to understand two key issues. The first is the remarkable historical and global continuity in sports media narratives. I am asking questions such as: under what conditions and in what ways do different forms of difference matter (or are made to matter), and what effects does that âmatteringâ have on the possibilities for making sense of sport, sports media, and various forms of identity? The question that has been âitchingâ me asks what kinds of articulations would need to emerge for sportswomen and other marginalized groups in sport to become part of the mediasport furniture, so to speak? Cultural studies allows me to imagine even potent articulations as unstable and (potentially) able to be articulated in different ways. This leads to a focus on instabilities within the default settings of mediasport.
The second key issue involves investigating the spaces in which ânormalâ media discourses are (usually temporarily) disrupted: the moments when those who are usually marginalized, such as sportswomen, cross the boundary into respectful public visibility. My search for positive disruptions, resulting from frustration at the persistent mainstream media marginalization of sportswomen, led to analyses of the possibilities of the Web 2.0 environment for sportswomen and supporters of womenâs sport to create and circulate new narratives. This new focus led me to Margaret Wetherell's work around emotion as a social practise (Wetherell, 2012), and Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin's work around third-wave feminism (Heywood & Dworkin, 2003), which influence the way I am looking at the changing nature of female sporting embodiment and (self-) representation (e.g., Bruce, 2016a). I am increasingly interested in the diversity of representation and its ambivalent nature; the way that, in Hallâs (1997b) terms, difference âcan be both positive and negativeâ (p. 238) â along with the conditions under which it falls into either category (or both at once).
I am simultaneously saddened by the failure of womenâs sport advocates to make any significant impact on the amount of coverage of sportswomen, and troubled by why this is the case. Given the cultural studies insistence on strategic intervention, I question why advocates for womenâs sport (and I would include those fighting for âbetterâ representation of disabled, racial or ethnic minority and LGBTI athletes) have failed so miserably to dis-articulate sport (and sports media in particular) from cultural ideals of heterosexual, able-bodied, white masculinity. It appears that part of the failure is to find the right layers or levels at which to intervene in mediasportâs role in reifying and constantly re-articulating the relationship between sport and masculinity. In an interview, Grossberg proposed that
if you keep fighting battles and you keep losing (on all sorts of sites and fronts, including institutional and popular struggles), it must be that there is something wrong with the story you are telling, the story from which you are deriving political strategies. Somehow, you don't understand the rules of the game, you are not playing the right game, you are not playing on the right field âŚYou don't understand whatâs happening well enough. (Liang, Wong, Wong, & Chan, 2005, para. 13)
He suggests that if we gain âa better sense of the state of play on the field of forces in popular culture and daily life,â this opens up the chance to âsee more clearly where struggles are possible and, in some cases, even actual. Then we can try to find ways to oppose them, or help articulate them, to nurture and support them and perhaps, to bring them into visible relations with other strugglesâ (Grossberg, 1992, p. 66). It was these words that created the space in my thinking to write a novel exploring these issues in womenâs sport (Bruce, 2016b), âto take risks and go places that would not be possibleâ in other forms of writing (Richardson, 1994, p. 521). If we need to find ways to create new narratives or tell new stories, as Richardson (2001) and Grossberg (see Liang et al., 2005) advocate, then a novel seemed one way to liberate possibilities that research had not yet brought into visible relations.
Yet, the still-unanswered question remains: How can we tell new stories and create new connections to help journalists and media workers articulate femininity, disability, and homosexuality to sport, and present all athletes, no matter their race, ethnicity, or nationality, in nuanced and non-stereotypical ways? Certainly, this is no simple task of informing sports media outlets and journalists that they are inequitable and/or discriminatory (as so many disability and gay rights activists, and womenâs sport researchers, foundations and organizations, and even government departments have tried and failed to achieve). Instead, we need to understand how and where to make strategic alliances that make a difference. What seems to be missing is the ability of advocates for women, disabled, and LGBTI athletes, and those fighting against the echoes of racial stereotyping, to find ways to build new coalitions and create alternative articulations.
