| 1. |
- Karlsson, Jesper, et al.
(author)
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Selling youth sport : the production and promotion of immaterial values in commercialised child and youth sport
- 2023
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In: Sport, Education and Society. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1357-3322 .- 1470-1243. ; , s. 565-578
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The contexts in which young people participate in sport are diverse. In Scandinavia, as in many other countries, child and youth sport is mainly organised in non-profit, membership-based and voluntary driven sports clubs. In Sweden, this model is now challenged by commercial businesses providing child and youth sport services. The overall aim of this article is to provide empirically based knowledge about these ongoing and largely unexplored commercialisation processes. The focus of the article is to illuminate how commercial businesses produce immaterial values through the promotion of sport services. In this article, we have explored the cultural and social values produced and promoted by commercial businesses in youth sport. Drawing on the website communications of eight commercial businesses from four different commercial strands, we use the concept of immaterial labour to consider the values produced when child and youth sport is turned into a desirable product on the market. The values generated from the texts on the selected websites are the immaterial values of (i) competence, (ii) individually adjusted training and, (iii) happiness. These values are enunciated differently by the businesses in the different strands. We situate the findings in relation to western social and cultural values and discuss the potential consequences of these value productions for contemporary ideas about youth sport and the way it should be organised.
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| 2. |
- Qvarfordt, Anna, 1965-, et al.
(author)
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Limitations and duties : elite athletes’ perceptions of compliance with anti-doping rules
- 2021
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In: Sport in Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1743-0437 .- 1743-0445. ; 24:4, s. 551-570
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The main purpose of this article is to examine how elite athletes perceive their own responsibilities and possibilities to be compliant with the anti-doping regulations, and to draw conclusions about what these perceptions mean in relation to the legitimacy of the anti-doping system. A qualitative research design, with interviews conducted with athletes globally, was employed to capture elite sportspersons’ views on anti-doping policy and procedures. The analysis was based on a theoretical framework on legitimacy. The findings show that athletes’ situation is characterized by limited information and a lack of leeway. At the same time, athletes find themselves obliged to be dutiful. We discuss the complex situation of simultaneously facing perceived limitations and duties, and consider the limits that athletes experience in relation to compliance, which may place the legitimacy of the anti-doping system at risk.
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| 3. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-, et al.
(author)
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Coola idoler och hjälpsamma förebilder
- 2014
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In: Svensk Idrottsforskning. - 1103-4629. ; 23:1, s. 35-39
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Bland skejtare har både förebilder och idoler hög status. Det höga anseendet får de genom sin kompetens, men det är olika slags kunnande som ligger bakom. Idoler bygger sin ställning på teknisk skicklighet. Förebilderna ska vara pedagogiskt kompetenta och schyssta personer.
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| 4. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-
(author)
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Gender manoeuvring in Swedish skateboarding : negotiations of femininities and the hierarchical gender structure
- 2013
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In: Young - Nordic Journal of Youth Research. - Los Angeles : SAGE Publications. - 1103-3088 .- 1741-3222. ; 21:1, s. 29-53
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Nordic countries score high gender equality ratings and we have a long tradition of working with feminist agendas promising liberal futures to both young women and men. Still, today’s young women struggle to make room for female participation in male-dominated space. Based on ethnographic research, this article explores gender manoeuvring, i.e. manipulations of the relationship between masculinity and femininity in the patterned beliefs and activities of Swedish skateboarding. The three most apparent femininities in the empirical material, ‘the tomboy’, ‘the bitch’, and ‘the lesbian’, are discussed and how they sometimes give rise to gender manoeuvring and sometimes not. It is argued that the formation of a national network harnessing feminist strategies has been successful in making space for female skateboarding in local skateparks and the mainstream media. The negotiations these actions result in have the potential to transform the hierarchical gender order between and among masculinities and femininities. However, simultaneous tendencies to preserve the unequal gender structure through valuing both hegemonic masculinity and femininity become visible.
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| 5. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-, et al.
(author)
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Imagining and Making Material Encounters : Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire
- 2019
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In: Journal of Sport and Social Issues. - : Sage Publications. - 0193-7235 .- 1552-7638. ; 43:2, s. 122-142
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders? skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: ?kind? and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore.
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| 6. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-
(author)
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Knowing and teaching kinaesthetic experience in skateboarding : an example of sensory emplacement
- 2014
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In: Sport, Education and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1357-3322 .- 1470-1243. ; 19:6, s. 752-772
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The body has become a vital research object in several disciplines in recent years. Indeed, in the social sciences and humanities, a corporeal turn in which embodiment has become a key concept related to learning and socialisation is discussed. This cross-disciplinary paper addresses the epistemological question of how we know what we know and theoretically and empirically contributes to current arguments of a shift from embodiment to emplacement. In other words, this study strives for understanding of the intersection of mind, body and place through a focus on how bodily knowing is formed as part of a moving world. The purpose of the paper is to explore the kinaesthetic experience as bodily knowing in emplaced semi-formal teaching. Through long-term ethnography in a Swedish skateboard setting and in-depth analysis of digital visual material, this paper demonstrates how kinaesthetic experience might be viewed as knowing and how a particular type of this experience might be interpreted as explosiveness and, as such, an act of physical remembrance and energy transformation. Knowing is formed along paths of movement and rhythm, and kinaesthesia is identified as a multisensory experience. It is argued that a fruitful way of bridging the mind–body divide is to view the body as un/knowing, rendering it both knowing and not knowing simultaneously. Moreover, emplaced via its senses in a sociocultural and spatio-temporal environment, this conceptualisation of a moving body in a moving world might allow for re-thinking regarding how a body in context knows, teaches and, possibly, learns.
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| 7. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-, et al.
(author)
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Routes and roots to knowing in Shaun White’s snowboarding road trip : A mycorrhizaic approach to multisensory emplaced learning in exergames
- 2019
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In: Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum. - Malmö : Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University. - 2000-088X. ; 10, s. 251-278
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article explores learning during game-play of a snowboarding video game intrigued by questions raised in the wake of the increasing mediatisation and digitisation of learning. Correspondingly, we answer to calls for more suitable metaphors for learning to cater for the entangled learning processes that changes related to the increase of digital media may infer. Using a short term sensory ethnography approach, we elaborate on the idea of multisensory emplaced learning and propose an organic metaphor – mycorrhiza – to both methodology and learning. Mycorrhiza refers to a symbiotic relationship between fungi and roots of plants in its environment where fungi are the visible effects of the mycorrhiza. The metaphor provides a way to start to unpack sensory, visual and embodied aspects of learning in the complexities of the digital age. By elaborating on the mycorrhizaic concepts fungus, soil, growth, mycelia and symbiosis we show three interrelated ways of moving through this game: (i) a social and cultural route, (ii) a competitive route, and (iii) an experiential route. With help of the metaphor we discern the symbiotic relations between what appeared in our empirical material as visual and other human and non-human aspects of emplacement.
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| 8. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-, et al.
(author)
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Skateboarding beyond the limits of gender? : Strategic interventions in Sweden
- 2018
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In: Leisure Studies. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0261-4367 .- 1466-4496. ; 37:4, s. 24-439
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Sweden prides itself as a country where young women can enjoy gender equality. Yet many young women skateboarders still experience discomfort when skateboarding in public spaces. We argue that diverse strategies are required to intervene in the intransigent problem of gender inequality in the male-dominated sport of skateboarding. We discuss two intertwined strategies adopted in Swedish skateboarding contexts, strategic visibility and strategic entitlement. Strategic visibility is premised on making girls a special case, separated from the boys, and therefore highly visible. The other intervention goes beyond the limits of gender, aiming to achieve strategic entitlement, which takes-for-granted girls’ participation and competence. Drawing from ethnographic data, we explore the paradoxical spaces of these interventions, identifying the benefits and risks of each strategy. We conclude that both strategies are important, yet the latter breaks new ground. Strategic entitlement, which constructs skateboarding girls as ordinary and indistinguishable from boys, no longer constructs gender as a limiting factor. Interventions to promote gender equality should include strategies that seek to go beyond gender and strategies that acknowledge the significance of gender. We need to keep experimenting with and researching the unintended consequences of all strategies for challenging and changing male dominance in sport and leisure.
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| 9. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-, et al.
(author)
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Skateboarding: From Urban Spaces to Subcultural Olympians
- 2022
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In: Young - Nordic Journal of Youth Research. - : Sage Publications. - 1103-3088 .- 1741-3222. ; 30:2, s. 121-131
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Skateboarding or ‘sidewalk surfing’ emerged in the late 1950’s southern California, whereby surfers were not in the sea. The aim of this special issue is to benchmark critical research on skateboarding, youth and subculture on an international basis to contribute to the field of research which explores contemporary skateboarding focusing on young people’s everyday lives from a cultural perspective. Skateboarding is a very individual thing; it is about balance, and it is also about how you hold yourself in a collective subculture within local communities and global media where ‘living side ways’ as Friedel (2016) calls it, is a type of philosophy of the everyday. Skateboarding has evolved from a creative urban activity with a legendary past meshed with subcultural values into an Olympic sport and a platform for multinational industry and global enterprises. On this basis there are tensions between subcultural authenticity within skateboarding and the pursuit of instrumental profit sought by corporate companies who are at some distance from the young people themselves. (Introduction)
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| 10. |
- Fors, Vaike, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Multisensory Emplaced Learning : Resituating situated learning in a moving world
- 2013
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In: Mind, culture and activity. - Philadelphia, PA : Routledge. - 1074-9039 .- 1532-7884. ; 20:2, s. 170-183
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article outlines the implications of a theory of "sensory- emplaced learning" for understanding the interrelationships between the embodied and environmental in learning processes. Understanding learning as multisensory and contingent within everyday place-events, this framework analytically describes how people establish themselves as "situated learners." This approach is demonstrated through three examples of how culturally constructed sensory categories offer routes to knowing about the multisensoriality of learning experiences. This approach, we suggest, offers new routes within practice-oriented educational theories for understanding how human bodies become situated and embedded in cultural, social, and material practices within constantly shifting place-events. © 2013 Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition.
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