Suchergebnisse

Located within feminist scholarship on sport, leisure and physical cultures, this article explores our attempts to understand what conducting 'research with responsibility' means as White, settler-coloniser, immigrant women researching surfing, place and community in Aotearoa New Zealand. Taking inspiration from Hamilton's 'intersectional reflexivity' and Māori feminist scholars' discussion of (de)colonizing methodologies, we discuss the development of our intersectional, collaborative methodology to understand our relationships to place, community and surfing. This co-ethnographic approach helped us navigate the ethics and challenges of knowledge production in Aotearoa New Zealand, and enabled us to be aware of, and open to, different worldviews and ways of knowing. We argue this methodology has value in developing better recognition of our own privileges; understanding of the intersectional politics-of-place we are part of as researchers, and as community members; and of the assumptions, motivations and values that inform our research practices.

This article introduces the special issue (JSSI 45.1 and 45.2) on 'Understanding Blue Spaces' which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems of the role of blue spaces in our wellbeing—individually, socially, and ecologically. In addition to outlining the 10 articles in the SI, which include ocean swimming, surfing, sailing/yachting, and waka ama paddling, we contextualize this work, discussing key thematic areas both across these papers, and in the wider interdisciplinary body of work on blue spaces, wellbeing, and sport. Specifically, we outline the role of physical activities and leisure practices in how we access, understand, experience, and develop relationships to seas and oceans, as well as to self, places and communities of human and non-human others. We also discuss the ways in which particular bodies, individuals, and communities (human and more-than-human) are marginalized or excluded, and the need for understanding concepts such as wellbeing, place, and self beyond dominant European traditions. This SI highlights how localised experiences of blue spaces can be, while emphasising the need to recognize diverse cultural, economic, geographic, sociodemographic, and political factors that contribute to a disconnect with, or exclusion from blue spaces, impacting who can use blue spaces, how they can be used, how they can be researched, and how power is reproduced and contested.

Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the 'performance' of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for assessing publications in the humanities and social sciences, as the data, algorithms and systems which support them cater to authorship and citation practices of the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These issues are amplified for journals in the sociology of sport, which publish research by humanities and social science scholars whose work is quantified according to the standards of the health science departments in which they frequently work. In this discussion, we critically examine how common forms of metrics and altmetrics, including those produced by Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Altmetric.com, are applied to available sociology of sport journals. We analyse and critique how different metric algorithms produce variable measures of performance for each of the journals in the field and reveal how other information available on these databases can augment our understanding of the sociology of sport publishing ecology. Far from advocating the value of metrics and altmetrics, our analysis is intended to arm scholars and journals with the information required to critically navigate the entanglement of metrics and altmetrics with neoliberalism, audit culture and digital technologies in universities.

This article adopts a feminist relational orientation to investigate the care practices that women develop when producing and engaging with body-focussed content online. We propose and argue for an embodied ethics of social media use to understand women's enactments and exchanges as they relate to shared corporeal concerns. Drawing on qualitative interview data, and using Judith Butler's understanding of corporeal vulnerability as the basis for mutual recognition, this article investigates social actors' ethical orientations towards, and attempts at, improving the collective experiences of women in the context of Instagram use for physical activity. We identify several ways in which exercising women practice an embodied ethics of care on Instagram, including sharing unedited images of themselves, not judging others' bodies, awareness-raising and supporting others. By conceptualising women's everyday social media encounters as an embodied ethical practice, this study develops new theoretical insights to understand women's sharing of body-focussed content online.