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- Daudi, Aurélien
(författare)
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Conspicuous Fitness : Social Media, Fitspiration, and the Rise of the Exhibitionistic Self
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation deals with the emergence, attraction, and normalization of a widespread, digital exhibitionism and its implications. In this age of imagery, the compulsive sharing of personal photographs on social media has become pervasive. Unabashedly narcissistic displays are all but encouraged. A transformation of social norms has occurred, and it is particularly evident within the social media fitness culture, known as fitspiration.A portmanteau of "fitness" and "inspiration," fitspiration ostensibly promotes health through visual content on social media but is often characterized by visual displays of the body, even overt nudity, framed within a fitness context. Amid a pervasive youth mental health crisis, this study posits this novel phenomenon as more than a digital trend; rather, it reflects deeper socio-cultural shifts, ideological currents, going so far as encompassing existential dilemmas. Crucially, it also represents a manifestation of the intrinsic biases of the medium itself. As such, it affords insights into how the dominance of social media impacts human communication and societal values.Drawing on Nietzschean philosophy and core principles of media ecology, this study presents a piercing analysis of fitspiration and its facilitating medium. It argues that the self-representational practices of fitspiration exemplify a novel trend, aimed at maximizing attention and validation, that now saturate social media. Examining these aesthetic practices, their widespread appeal, and the implications of a culture increasingly oriented around such self-expressions, it argues that photo-based social media exploits unreflective, desirous, and narcissistic impulses, fostering an unhealthy cultural trajectory.Through this critical examination of fitspiration, the study illuminates the profound impact of social media, challenging conventional wisdom and offering new insights into the relationship between technology, culture, and human behavior. It also outlines crucial philosophical and ethical perspectives argued to be necessary for navigating the challenges imposed by the current age of imagery.
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| 2. |
- Lidström, Isak, 1988-
(författare)
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På skidor i kulturella gränsland : Samiska spår i skidsportens historia
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this compilation thesis is to shed light on the Sámi history of ski sport in Sweden from an organizational and cultural history perspective where concepts like nation and ethnicity fill an important function. The Sámi are an indigenous people living in Sápmi, a land area extending across the North Calotte region and including parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The thesis contains six separate articles which together comprise a research period extending between 1879 and 1990. The articles have been studied from different points of view with the focus on how skis as sport equipment have been historically charged with cultural expressions created by the individual skiers as well as by the general public’s interest in skiing. These cultural expressions have also been internalized as collective identification objects positioning the mutual relations between groups and collectives. By historical links to kings, heroic myths and polar expeditions, the sport of skiing has, for example, become associated with a national Swedish identity. By pinpointing its Sámi origins in the light of history, the ski sport is in this thesis instead viewed as a culturally heterogeneous phenomenon. In three of the articles of the thesis, the Sámi history of Swedish ski sport is studied. The focus of these studies lies on how ”Sáminess” and ”Swedishness”, viewed as cultural identities, were constructed in connection with the early rise and development of ski sport from the late 19th century to the interwar period (Articles I and II) as well as with the sporting career of downhill skier Bengt-Erik Grahn in the 1960s (Article V). The studies illustrate that, at its rise and early development, cross-country skiing in Sweden was regarded as a Sámi sport. In the early 20th century, however, an ethnic borderline was created between what was Sámi and what was Swedish, which gradually invisibilized the Sámi link to ski sport. Instead, cross-country skiing acquired the inofficial character of being the Swedish national sport. The three remaining studies investigate the separately organized Sámi sport movement from its rise in 1948 through the year 1990 (Articles III, IV and VI). The origin of this movement derives from the Sámi Championships, a winter event whose original contests include skiing and other sports with a background in reindeer husbandry. The articles clarify the importance of ski sport in creating contrastive ethnic identities between Sáminess and Swedishness (Articles I–V). Similarly, these constructed cultural markers of Sáminess and Swedishness have been interwoven to symbolize an overarching ethnic national identity (Articles IV–V). In addition, the way ski sport has been operated within the separately organized Sámi sport movement has carried weight in the creation of Sápmi as a crossborder nation (Article VI).
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| 3. |
- Lindberg, Matilda
(författare)
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Exploring ways of empowering pupils in physical education through circus : an action research project
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The empowerment of children is emphasized in a variety of contexts. For example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child mandates opportunities for children to be heard and to express their opinions, and the Swedish compulsory school curriculum advocates democratic teaching methods. Despite this, research shows that children’s influence in school remains limited and that democratic ways of working are particularly lacking in physical education. Therefore, this study proposes changes to physical education. The aim of this action research project was to explore ways of empowering pupils in physical education. The study involves ten-year-old children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, their physical education teacher, and a teacher-researcher. The study is at the intersection of three different fields in relation to physical education: influence, language, and creativity. Exploratory circus activities are used as a means to empower pupils and challenge the conventional structure of the subject. The study offers multiple contributions, such as practical suggestions for empowering pupils in physical education and the complex interplay between theory and practice. The findings show that physical education can serve as a platform for children to be creative, express themselves in a variety of ways, and exert influence. However, the findings reveal that empowering pupils can be a challenging process for a teacher because of prevailing norms in school, ingrained teaching habits, and both the teacher’s and pupils’ previous experiences and preconceptions of what education, and physical education in particular, entails. Finding ways to empower pupils means finding ways for teachers to share power equitably with pupils. Teaching and learning circus in physical education contributes significantly to critical thinking and acting upon how education is constructed and conducted.
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| 4. |
- Mashreghi, Sepandarmaz
(författare)
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Decolonial re-existence and sports : stories of Afghan youth in Sweden
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the context of sports and migration, research within policy-driven themes (i.e., integration) have consistently flattened out the migrants’ experiences, meanings and understandings of sports and physical activity to make sense for and from Euro-centric perspectives and framings. Thus, muting other relevant, alternative and already existing ways of living sports and physical activity. Critical sports studies, on the other hand, have demonstrated that sports (and physical activity) remain a contested domain where various human experiences are negotiated and remade along the intersecting lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, legal status and (dis)ability. The aim in this study has been to work within a decolonial framework to demonstrate how migrant youth in Sweden navigate, experience, challenge and generate knowledge in relation to physical activity and sports.Doing decolonial research in sports studies means delinking from Eurocentric thought and epistemology in order to uncover alternative forms of physical culture and practice that generate different meanings to that of the (Western) hegemonic discourse. To do this, we, the youth and I, have worked and researched together within the framework of participatory art-based action research and our shared Khorasani epistemology. This means that the coresearchers have been active participants in generating research material, analysing the material and disseminating the generated knowledge. Grounded in Indigenous, borderland, Chicana and Black feminist knowldeges as well decolonial thought, this thesis contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the field of sport and exercise in relation to young asylum seekers and migration research. The participatory analysis demonstrates that for the Afghan youth in this study sport and physical activity was not a distinct entity, rather it was intertwined with various aspects of their lives, such as their experiences of child labour, pleasures, hopes for the future, leisure, social and mental aspects, and migration experiences. Furthermore, the youth revealed that despite various forms of oppression, trauma and hardship, they constantly returned, or rather, reclaimed life and future in their acts of self-reflection, friendship, love and hope within the context of sport and life. They, thus, moved beyond the mere resistance of the precarities in their lives to bring about a re-existence. The findings of this thesis also highlight the affordances and limitations of participatory methods, art-based research and decolonising work. Although the participatory methods grounded in the epistemology of the youth (and myself), allowed us to reclaim and tell our stories in our ways, they fell short in making lasting systemic transformations. These limitations also give rise to new questions and possibilities for future research in relation to how change and transformation are defined and researched; and whether these definitions are somewhat limiting and influenced by the colonial rhetoric of salvation underlining participatory action research basic principles of empowerment and critical consciousness.
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