Through our teaching, research, and scholarship, we analyze and aim to decentre structures and forms of systemic and institutionalized privilege. In so doing, we attempt to bring attention to and shift the histories and processes that have served to marginalize diverse peoples and communities. Here are some examples of our work.
In a context where striving for gender equity in relation to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals seems more pressing than ever before, Sport, Gender and Development: Intersections, Innovations and Future Trajectories (2021; Emerald Insight) brings together an exploration of sport feminisms to offer new approaches to research on Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) in global and local contexts. Including postcolonial and decolonial feminist lenses by drawing upon fieldwork with organizations and individuals in Afghanistan, Uganda, Nicaragua, and India, Sport, Gender and Development reveals the complexities of development and gender discourses and how they operate on and through researchers, practitioners, and participants' bodies. Delving into a thoughtful engagement with the (dis)connections and comparisons across these diverging contexts, this book from Lyndsay Hayhurst, Holly Thorpe, and Megan Chawansky offers a critically reflexive account of what is transpiring in the transnational sport, gender and development field, while remaining sensitive to the importance of community context and local iterations. Taking up emerging and contemporary feminist issues in sport-related international development, this book advances empirical, conceptual, and theoretical developments in sport, gender and development.
Yuka Nakamura’s Playing Out of Bounds (2019; University of Toronto Press) investigates the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament (NACIVT), an annual event that attracts thousands of competitors from the U.S. and Canada. Its two key features are the 9-man game, where there are nine instead of the usual six volleyball players on the court, and the fact that player eligibility is limited to "100% Chinese" and Asian players, as defined in the tournament rules. These rules that limit competitors to specific ethno-racial groups is justified by the discrimination that Chinese people faced when they were denied access to physical activity spaces, and instead played in the alleyways and streets of Chinatowns. Drawing on interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of websites and tournament documents, Playing Out of Bounds explores how participants understand and negotiate their sense of belonging within this community of volleyball players and how membership within and the boundaries of this community are continually being (re)defined.
Hernan Humana's Playing Under the Gun: An Athlete's Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile (2016; Aconcagua Publishing) is a window on sport in Chile during a time of danger. His accounts are personal and poignant. These were difficult years for everyone in Chile, especially for those with some public presence. Wearing the national uniform was a constant challenge not only because of the high level of competition, but also because of what the uniform stood for: Chile during the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet. Playing under the Gun is not just a metaphor; it was the sad reality for all athletes who were not on the side of the coup which destroyed one of the most stable democracies of Latin America.
In collaboration with Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network, Amanda De Lisio and students volunteered their time and energies in providing a Health, Safety and Wellness Seminars series to Asian migrant and sex workers in Newmarket. Please go here to learn more about the ways in this initiative has aimed to support women in precarious and stigmatized work.
Despite call of alarms about the push for university degree programs to focus on preparing students to be workplace-ready, there has been neither a critical examination of this pressure on or within Kinesiology as a multi-disciplinary area in higher education, nor the ways in which contemporary Kinesiology programs in Canada shape (or not) students’ perceptions and praxis as they relate to themselves in the world, to human movement, and to community and social welfare broadly. Parissa Safai is Principal Investigator, with Co-Investigator Yuka Nakamura, of multi-year SSHRC-funded study of how Kinesiology programs in Canadian universities frame students’ understandings and experiences of the multi-disciplinary study of human movement in neoliberal times.
The bicycle’s capacity to respond to pressing social issues (e.g., gender inequality, access to education, reducing gender-based violence) and facilitate social change has inspired both interest and optimism, especially in the context of COVID-19. With support from SSHRC and CFI, Lyndsay Hayhurst is leading a study focused on these very issues with co-investigators from across Canada and the U.S. and Kinesiology graduate and undergraduate students from the DREAMING in Sport Lab. The Wheels of Change study uses community-based, digital participatory approaches to build on the activities, findings and community partnerships developed during the research team’s five-year study of ‘bicycles for development’ (BFD) — the use of bicycles to achieve community-level, national and global development objectives in Canada, Uganda, Nicaragua, South Africa, and India. A digital platform for the ‘Bicycles and Development Transnational Collective’ is being launched in Spring 2023 to mobilize bicycle and social justice-oriented organizations, practitioners and participants from across the globe to share knowledge, resources, policy advocacy strategies and programming ideas.
Spearheaded by Parissa Safai, The Communities in Motion initiative celebrates innovative community-based research, teaching and service initiatives undertaken by students and faculty in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science. Throughout the Communities in Motion website, many examples of university-community collaboration around sport, exercise and physical activity are shared. Communities in Motion also focuses on the importance of Knowledge Mobilization as an integral part of the community-based research process, with particular attention to digital storytelling as an accessible approach to both engaging in community-based research, teaching or service and translating and sharing knowledge with others.
Aligned with the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (specifically calls #57 and #62ii), and in our effort to indigenize university curriculum, Larkin Lamarche co-developed a land-based experiential learning activity for upper-year students on mental health and aging with colleagues from McMaster University. Those colleagues included Aly Bailey, Leah Poplestone (former student of the course), and Lorrie Gallant (a First Nations artist and educator from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory). In the words of Lorrie Gallant: “This assignment was designed as an opportunity to share a greater understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing. To experience land and place outside of conventional learning and to physically feel the earth beneath our feet. To see that there is an intimate connection between land and identity. And that the healing of disconnection for Indigenous people is reconnection.”
Students were asked to find an item outside from the natural world that spoke to them, bring the item inside their own home, create a space for the item and live with it for five days, and then to return the item back where they found it through ceremony. Each step of the experience was captured through visual media of the student’s choosing (recordings, pictures, drawings). Students were asked to journal about their experience through each step, then write a critical reflection to unpack connection, disconnection, mental health, and aging. The image seen here is titled “The Branch.” The student who offered this image wrote in their journal: “Since this experience, [my mom] has received a recent cancer diagnosis that has affected her mental health and is experiencing aging “gracefully” in a more somber state. Her mortality has come into question, and this frightens her. It frightens all of us. I think about the connections between the displacement of the branch I took from its natural environment and equate it to my own mother with her diagnosis, her age and her mental state. What if she was forced to become displaced due to this diagnosis in any such capacity? Would she acclimatize? How would someone at her age be able to cope with this new reality? Would this be fair to her?”
"To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing."
Raymond Williams
Photo by Joanjo Pavon on Unsplash