‘Flourishing against the normative’: Exploring the potential for feminist transdisciplinary research within sport studies.

Abstract

The academic field of what in the UK has been termed “Sport Studies” is a multi- and inter-disciplinary field of teaching and research including the natural sciences (including physiology, biomechanics, motor learning), social sciences (i.e. sociology, anthropology, politics, and economics), and humanities (e.g. history, philosophy). Despite this breadth, many researchers and students working outside positivistic paradigms have had to fight to gain legitimacy for their approaches. For sport feminist researchers, this has been further complicated by a long-entrenched culture of masculinity that operates at many levels from the gendering of the work-place and curricula to the promotion and adoption of particular methodological assumptions and practices. Early sport feminist researchers and activists challenged the male-dominated world of sport, and of sport academe. They showed that women's lives and experiences mattered. There continues to be a vibrant body of sport feminist research which challenges the “normative” disciplinary boundaries, methodologies, epistemologies, and power relationships within sport. In this chapter, four cis-gender white women feminist researchers who have been active as researchers, postgraduate supervisors, and in feminist praxis, reflect on the potential for and challenge of a transdisciplinary feminist framework within sport-related studies.