Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

The poster's focus will be an ongoing research project, aiming to analyse teenage girls' affective and sociocultural negotiations in the changing room, with smartphones and social media as part.

Physical activity is something teenage girls engage in both in leisure time and within school. To be physically active, one often needs to go through the changing room. However, previous research shows pupils sometimes experience the room as problematic, especially teenage girls (Gymnasieskolernes Idrætslærerforening, 2018; Moen et al., 2018). Furthermore, teenage girls do not use social media; they live social media (Goodyear et al., 2022). Social media has changed social interactions, which now can move through (the changing room) walls (Couldry & Hepp, 2018). One of the reasons for pupils' experienced problematic was the presence of smartphones and the fear of being photographed and spread on social media (Jönsson, 2016).

To investigate this, a flexible theoretical framework is to be used. The definition of the body is through new materialism and the notion of body and mind as intertwined. The social is learned through sociocultural regimes and intersubjective bodily practises, as part of the world with other materiality (Allegranti, 2013). To investigate the body, affect theory, elaborated by Probyn (2005), is to be used.

The method is semi-structured interviews with walk-along and a visual component consisting of a video camera. The method is inspired by short-term ethnography (Pink & Morgan, 2013). The selection is teenage girls in Sweden. The participant will be followed through the changing room while showing and explaining their practice (fully dressed, in an empty room). Meanwhile, an interview will be conducted. By filming, multidimensional data is collected.

The expected finding is a deeper understanding of teenage girls changing room experience and practises. How they negotiate in the room, and how smartphones and social media take part or not.

The relevance to Nordic educational research is how the perception and usage of changing rooms seem to have shifted from being a natural part in connection to physical activity to being a room inflicting insecurity amongst pupils and debates amongst teachers.

Att ägna sig åt fysisk aktivitet görs såväl på fritiden som inom skolans ram. Där blir kroppen central. Det är en kropp som rör sig och svettas, som syns och känns på olika sätt. 

Projektet kommer att innehålla två delstudier, den första ska handla om tonårsflickors informella lärprocesser om(kring) fysiskt aktiva kroppar på internet. Sociala medier är i vår samtid en stor del av tonårsflickors liv, där flickskap (re)produceras. Metoden som ska användas är fokusgruppsintervjuer och fotoelicitering med visuell ansats. 

Den andra delstudien ska handla om tonårsflickors praktik och affektiva upplevelser i omklädningsrum. Omklädningsrum används(?) på veckobasis av tonårsflickor och är i viss mån en förutsättning för fysisk aktivitet. Metoden som ska användas är influerad av sensorisk etnografi med visuell ansats.

Projektets vetenskapliga bidrag blir ökad kunskap om sociala och kulturella faktorer som främjar och förhindrar flickors fysiska aktivitet samt hur och varför.  

Since the late 1990s, professional football players moving across national borders in search of the best possible livelihoods constitute a form of transnational labour migration that has grown enormously in scale and scope. The Swedish Premier Division has gradually been incorporated into this global player market. The development began in 1974, when Swedish clubs for the first time were allowed to sign foreign players. However, it was only after the Bosman-ruling in 1995, and the removal of restrictions on the number of foreign players, that the league was forcefully globalized. In this article, this globalizing development between 1974 and 2019 is analysed. The study shows that the development took place in three different phases, with the last phase (2009-19) constituting a break in the trend in globalization. From this point on, the number of players from countries in the nearby geographical area increased rapidly.

Dave Day’s edited collection from 2011, Sporting Lives (MMU Institute for Performance Research) originates from a Sporting Lives symposium hosted by MMU Cheshire, and must be considered a modern sport history classic. John S. Hellström is our reviewer, and he finds the sum of the parts to be most rewarding, even though some individual contributions are highly readable. Shame, though, that only one of eleven chapters is written about a women.

Success stories and heroic tales are recurrently investigated narrative genres in literature (Propp, 1998), journalism (Lule, 2001) and, not the least, in sports (Hellström, 2014). In sports, we repeatedly hear athletes explain their performance at half-time or give us reflections on a recently completed competition. However, these stories are not produced in a social vacuum; they are part of a discursive framework and a product of time and place. The trajectories for a legitimate success story is limited and specific storylines are repeated and holds a specific dramaturgical structure. The heroic story typically follows a temporal structure, from a beginning to an end, where events and performances function as phases of a narrative journey towards a defining triumph (Hoebeke et al. 2011). Which performances that constitutes the highlight of an athlete’s career will always be culturally determined, since cultures produces heroes according to their own specific values and traditions (Whannel, 2002). Thereby, the “personal” story is both a contextually specific narrative and a culturally shared narrative.

Aims and empirical material

In this paper, we are seeking to investigate how success stories in sports as a central part of the athletes identity work, and how these stories also serve as symbols for values and morals of a wider sporting society (Kilger, 2017). Many narrative scholars within the area of sports have been interested in retrospective studies of sports heroes or historical media studies of successful athletes (Hargreaves, 2000; Hellström, 2014; Whannel, 2002). In this study, we would like to pay particular attention to how personal narratives are built ´in-action´ and study which narrative elements are recurrent in the interviews and how is the own performance explained. Accordingly, we are interested in how such narratives of success and failure are co-constructed in the interview interaction and how they are structured. By investigating which master narratives that the participants recruit in their personal stories, this can help us to uncover shared normative storylines in elite sports. Moreover, we would like to illuminate how the athletes are using ´temporal-identity´ in the interviews as a way to construct a legitimate story of performance.

The data set will include after-performance media interviews from Swedish television (SVT) during the FIS Cross Country World Championships. More specifically, we are seeking to analyze between 15-20 after-race television interviews with Swedish athletes during the FIS Cross Country World Championships 2019 in Falun, Sweden.

Recruiting immigrant students to the initial PE teacher education at the Swedish School of Sort and Health Sciences

Sweden is in many ways a multicultural society. Off all children living in Sweden around 20 % are themselves born or have parents who are born in another country. These children has also made an impact on Swedish sports. Today, research show that boys from immigrant families are as much a part of organized sports as children born in Sweden, while girls from immigrant families are less active in organized sports.

Whereas organized sports in general show a similar pattern as society as a whole when it comes to children born in other countries, with the exception for girls, initial education for physical education (PE) does not. Studies reveals that the typical student in initial teacher education for PE is born in Sweden, grew up in the countryside and comes from families with limited tradition of higher education. In The Swedish School of sport and health sciences (GIH), only 9 % of the students in the PE teacher education program where immigrants or came from immigrant families. In this regard, the initial PE teacher education in Sweden faces a huge challenge.

In our presentation we will discuss some of the strategies that GIH has adopted to recruit students with other backgrounds than the typical. We will also address some of the challenges that comes with this regarding different cultural backgrounds and basic knowledge of the Swedish sporting culture. 

Det går knackigt för svensk tennis utanför landets gränser. I skrivande stund finns ingen svensk, man eller kvinna, i topp 100 på tennisens rankinglistor; faktum är att hela Norden representeras av blott två spelare på toppnivå, Finlands Jarkko Nieminen och Danmarks Caroline Wozniacki. I Sverige minns vi med saknad det så kallade svenska tennisundret. Under en följd av år producerade Sverige framgångsrika spelare på herrsidan, världsettor och topp 10-spelare, i långa banor. Vi minns kanske särskilt Björn Borg, Mats Wilander, Anders Järryd och Stefan Edberg från guldåren, och i ett något senare skede Jonas Björkman och Magnus Norman. Men det fanns åtskilliga fler, och för dem alla har livet förändrats drastiskt i och med idrottskarriärens slut. Det forskas faktiskt en hel del kring det som på svanka kallas karriärövergångar för idrottare, här hemma och internationellt. Ett bidrag till den forskningen är Jonas Stiers sociologiska undersökning av hur just ett antal svenska tennisspelares upplevde och handskades med övergången från firad världsstjärna till ”vanlig”, om än ovanligt rik, svensk. John Hellström, som själv forskar om idrottshjältar, har läst Stiers Kändisskap och statuspassager: Idrottslig identitet i upplevelseindustrins tjänst (Studentlitteratur), som trots bristande generaliserbarhet är värdefull på många sätt, inte minst när det gäller metodologins allmänna användbarhet.

This thesis examines the media construction of five Swedish sports heroes, active from the 1920’s to the beginning of the 2000’s. The analyses are based on the assumption that sports heroes are social products that reflect the dominating ideals and values of a society or culture, and that the media plays an important role in this process. Firstly, the media provide the attention necessary for successful athletes to become publically known and, secondly, they create the stories in which some athletes are represented as heroes while others are represented as villains. The use of narrative theory in this thesis builds on the idea that a story is not merely a way of presenting information, but a way of creating meaning. A person becomes a hero when he or she is described as a hero in a heroic tale. To analyze the media construction of sports heroes is thus to analyze the media stories of them as heroes.

In order to examine and compare the construction of sports heroes in the media, articles from daily press and magazines as well as broadcasts in radio and television have been analyzed. The results show that although each of the five heroes were valued and represented according to ideals and values specific of his or her time, there are similarities in the media representation of them that suggest that there is some degree of stability in the narrative of the Swedish sports hero over time. In many ways, the story of the Swedish sports hero is still intact since the 1920’s. However, this story is an ideal story and the process of constructing athletes as heroes has proved to be filled with compromise and contradictions. It can be argued that the media is more concerned with fitting the athletes into an already existing narrative of the Swedish sports hero than with representing them as individuals.

Seen in a wider historical context, sports heroes represent an example of how national identity is constructed in the media. National identity is, as many theorists have shown, a dynamic and relational process. What is considered typically Swedish thus changes over time and in different contexts. In this process the social status of sports heroes helps to stabilize as well as legitimize dominating ideas of Swedish national identity.   

Välj en idrott som är populär i Sverige. Vinn i ett stort mästerskap i direktsänd tv. Lägg ovanpå det en dramaturgiskt intressant berättelse så har du formeln för att bli en svensk sporthjälte. Men om medierna tappar intresset blir berömmelsen kortvarig.