title: Body pedagogies, coaching and culture: three Australian swimmers’ lived experiences

authors: McMahon, Jennifer Ann

subjects: swimming

abstract: Background: This paper reports doctoral research that explored body pedagogies in sport coaching and culture. Few studies have focused on body pedagogies as an integral dimension of sport coaching and on the experience of being coached and a member of a particular sporting culture. Even less is known about the long-term impact that particular body pedagogies may have on athletes’ lives, health and well-being.
Purpose: This paper seeks to contribute to a growing literature that acknowledges coaching as a complex pedagogical and social process. It reports on research aimed at providing new insights into the expression and lived experiences of body pedagogies in the context of elite and sub-elite swimming. A particular aim of the research was to address the impact, if any, of body pedagogies on swimmers’ lives, health and well-being – first, at the time when the participants were adolescent elite and sub-elite swimmers, and second, some 10–30 years later.
Methods: The research utilised narrative ethnography and autoethnography to explore the experiences of three female participants as adolescents participating at sub-elite and elite levels in Australian swimming, and as adults. Semi-structured interviews and collaborative development of narrative accounts were used to generate stories of experiences as adolescent swimmers and as adults in the present day.
Findings: The experiences of these three swimmers suggest that body pedagogies focused on weight, shape, body fat and performance permeated Australian competitive swimming culture. These body pedagogies formed prominent aspects of the discourse of the participants’ coaches and their practice within this study. Furthermore, body pedagogies were shown to have powerful and long-standing influence upon the participants’ feelings about their bodies and themselves. This research also suggests, however, elements of mediation of and resistance to dominant ideas and established pedagogical practices.
Conclusion: The research provides vivid insights into the subtle yet extremely powerful ways in which particular ideas ‘operate’ and become integral to ways of ‘being’ and ‘acting’ through body pedagogies within but also beyond both the sub-elite and elite contexts of Australian swimming sporting culture. Docility was shown by the three swimmers as they internalised body pedagogies and control, until they became their own ‘controller or overseer’ of their swimmer bodies. This points to a need for more research that focuses on the experiences and impact of body pedagogies in sport coaching.

text: Body pedagogies, coaching and culture: three Australian swimmers’ lived experiences Background: This paper reports doctoral research that explored body pedagogies in sport coaching and culture. Few studies have focused on body pedagogies as an integral dimension of sport coaching and on the experience of being coached and a member of a particular sporting culture. Even less is known about the long-term impact that particular body pedagogies may have on athletes’ lives, health and well-being.
Purpose: This paper seeks to contribute to a growing literature that acknowledges coaching as a complex pedagogical and social process. It reports on research aimed at providing new insights into the expression and lived experiences of body pedagogies in the context of elite and sub-elite swimming. A particular aim of the research was to address the impact, if any, of body pedagogies on swimmers’ lives, health and well-being – first, at the time when the participants were adolescent elite and sub-elite swimmers, and second, some 10–30 years later.
Methods: The research utilised narrative ethnography and autoethnography to explore the experiences of three female participants as adolescents participating at sub-elite and elite levels in Australian swimming, and as adults. Semi-structured interviews and collaborative development of narrative accounts were used to generate stories of experiences as adolescent swimmers and as adults in the present day.
Findings: The experiences of these three swimmers suggest that body pedagogies focused on weight, shape, body fat and performance permeated Australian competitive swimming culture. These body pedagogies formed prominent aspects of the discourse of the participants’ coaches and their practice within this study. Furthermore, body pedagogies were shown to have powerful and long-standing influence upon the participants’ feelings about their bodies and themselves. This research also suggests, however, elements of mediation of and resistance to dominant ideas and established pedagogical practices.
Conclusion: The research provides vivid insights into the subtle yet extremely powerful ways in which particular ideas ‘operate’ and become integral to ways of ‘being’ and ‘acting’ through body pedagogies within but also beyond both the sub-elite and elite contexts of Australian swimming sporting culture. Docility was shown by the three swimmers as they internalised body pedagogies and control, until they became their own ‘controller or overseer’ of their swimmer bodies. This points to a need for more research that focuses on the experiences and impact of body pedagogies in sport coaching.

year: 2013

title: The Sincerity Game: An Exploratory Study of Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Framework in Relation to Interaction and Identity Construction Online

authors: Baker, Amy Leanna

subjects: Erving Goffman, Identity, Presentation of Self Online, Artifact Affordances, Dramaturgical Framework, Symbolic Interactionism, Postmodernism, Sincerity, Self Construction, Online Self, Facebook, Social Networks, Mediated Interaction, Affordance Theory, Anthony Giddens, Actor Network Theory, Dramaturgy

abstract: Self-construction is an intrinsically interactionist process (Leary & Tananey, 2005). The formation and maintenance of identity is socially reliant. Understanding the ways in which interaction changes is therefore vital for recognising how the individual maintains an identity. Contemporary forms of online interaction via social media are, therefore, inescapably implicated in these larger processes.

Interactionist theory and Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework are grounded in the observations of face-to-face social situations. Identity construction scholarship since the introduction of technologically mediated interaction has yielded contradictory and incohesive results. Online interaction specifically has received special attention from an identity construction point of view. Implicated theories in such studies include variations of symbolic interactionism, romantic conceptions of self, idealisation, and postmodernism.

Deductive reasoning through the tested application of a single identity construction theory has typically left alternative interaction theories unexplored. Online interaction has normally been considered “special, because it is technological mediated interaction” (Pinch, 2010, p. 412).And the unique treatment of online interaction has resulted in the general dismissal of Goffman’s interactionist perspective.

This project attempted to re-evaluate the applicability of Goffman’s framework to online interaction. Inductive reasoning allowed alternative identity construction theories to arise naturally from in-depth interviews. Ten in-depth interviews and two case studies were conducted with users of the website Facebook. Participants were asked to discuss the ways in which they used the website to interact, and why. Coding and analysis followed by a constantly comparative approach allowed theory to develop naturally from the interview material.

Goffman’s dramaturgical framework found considerable applicability in this project’s analysis of participants’ use of Facebook. The five components of the framework, the actor, the performance, the stage, the team, and the audience were each identifiable in participants’ articulation of their interaction on this social networking website. Limitations in applicability however, were found to be due to a lack of affordance recognition.

Prior studies, attempting to reanalyse Goffman’s dramaturgical framework online, have found his perspective inapplicable. This reconceptualisation of identity formation has resulted in theorists exploring concepts of postmodernism and romantic idealism instead. Such stark perspectives were not articulated by this project’s interviewees. Rather, the primary finding of this project was that interviewees sought sincerity. Neither a fluid and multiple, nor a static and grounded identity was identified in participants’ Facebook selves. Interviewees instead took an approach to the social networking website best explained by adapting Giddens (1991). 

This project found that interviewees created a self through a narrative. By creating a trajectory of self through Facebook’s timeline and “maintaining constants of demeanor across varying settings of interaction” (Giddens, 1991, p. 100) interviewees sought perceived sincerity in their singular, evolving identity. As Facebook affords just one self to be portrayed to multiple audiences, unlike Goffman, Giddens’ perspective provided a resolution to Facebook’s lack of audience segregation and performance maintenance issues.

text: The Sincerity Game: An Exploratory Study of Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Framework in Relation to Interaction and Identity Construction Online Self-construction is an intrinsically interactionist process (Leary & Tananey, 2005). The formation and maintenance of identity is socially reliant. Understanding the ways in which interaction changes is therefore vital for recognising how the individual maintains an identity. Contemporary forms of online interaction via social media are, therefore, inescapably implicated in these larger processes.

Interactionist theory and Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework are grounded in the observations of face-to-face social situations. Identity construction scholarship since the introduction of technologically mediated interaction has yielded contradictory and incohesive results. Online interaction specifically has received special attention from an identity construction point of view. Implicated theories in such studies include variations of symbolic interactionism, romantic conceptions of self, idealisation, and postmodernism.

Deductive reasoning through the tested application of a single identity construction theory has typically left alternative interaction theories unexplored. Online interaction has normally been considered “special, because it is technological mediated interaction” (Pinch, 2010, p. 412).And the unique treatment of online interaction has resulted in the general dismissal of Goffman’s interactionist perspective.

This project attempted to re-evaluate the applicability of Goffman’s framework to online interaction. Inductive reasoning allowed alternative identity construction theories to arise naturally from in-depth interviews. Ten in-depth interviews and two case studies were conducted with users of the website Facebook. Participants were asked to discuss the ways in which they used the website to interact, and why. Coding and analysis followed by a constantly comparative approach allowed theory to develop naturally from the interview material.

Goffman’s dramaturgical framework found considerable applicability in this project’s analysis of participants’ use of Facebook. The five components of the framework, the actor, the performance, the stage, the team, and the audience were each identifiable in participants’ articulation of their interaction on this social networking website. Limitations in applicability however, were found to be due to a lack of affordance recognition.

Prior studies, attempting to reanalyse Goffman’s dramaturgical framework online, have found his perspective inapplicable. This reconceptualisation of identity formation has resulted in theorists exploring concepts of postmodernism and romantic idealism instead. Such stark perspectives were not articulated by this project’s interviewees. Rather, the primary finding of this project was that interviewees sought sincerity. Neither a fluid and multiple, nor a static and grounded identity was identified in participants’ Facebook selves. Interviewees instead took an approach to the social networking website best explained by adapting Giddens (1991). 

This project found that interviewees created a self through a narrative. By creating a trajectory of self through Facebook’s timeline and “maintaining constants of demeanor across varying settings of interaction” (Giddens, 1991, p. 100) interviewees sought perceived sincerity in their singular, evolving identity. As Facebook affords just one self to be portrayed to multiple audiences, unlike Goffman, Giddens’ perspective provided a resolution to Facebook’s lack of audience segregation and performance maintenance issues.

year: 2012

title: The challenges of culture to psychology and post-modern thinking

authors: Waldegrave, Charles

subjects: Maori

abstract: Someone at a workshop in the Waikato once said to us, “You know a Maori, if they want to, can always learn to be a psychologist, but a psychologist can’t learn to be a Maori”. Cultural knowledge may or may not be accompanied by social science knowledge. Cultural knowledge can stand on its own. Those who possess it, and choose to work in the institutions we are associated with, have gifts this country desperately needs. All our organisations require such people, and they need to be properly resourced, have employment security and control over their work. Their own work away from our organisations also requires adequate resourcing. They can heal their own in ways that we will never be able to. They will almost certainly offer the field rich alternative metaphors and meanings that can free us from the tired old medical, biological and social science ones. This also has implications for those in other branches of psychology, including research, experimental and industrial psychology. There is perhaps a unique opportunity for psychologists in this country of Aotearoa/New Zealand to recognise other ways of describing events, which will lead to creative practices and enable the health and welfare resources to get to those who most need them, on their own terms. It would also enable other people, other workers from other cultures to develop new paradigms, and new shifts in our field. This will not lead to the abandonment of social science, but it will enable that body of knowledge, to sit appropriately along side other realms of knowledge such as gender knowledge, and cultural knowledge, without dominating. A new experience for the social scientists, but I suspect a liberating one!

text: The challenges of culture to psychology and post-modern thinking Someone at a workshop in the Waikato once said to us, “You know a Maori, if they want to, can always learn to be a psychologist, but a psychologist can’t learn to be a Maori”. Cultural knowledge may or may not be accompanied by social science knowledge. Cultural knowledge can stand on its own. Those who possess it, and choose to work in the institutions we are associated with, have gifts this country desperately needs. All our organisations require such people, and they need to be properly resourced, have employment security and control over their work. Their own work away from our organisations also requires adequate resourcing. They can heal their own in ways that we will never be able to. They will almost certainly offer the field rich alternative metaphors and meanings that can free us from the tired old medical, biological and social science ones. This also has implications for those in other branches of psychology, including research, experimental and industrial psychology. There is perhaps a unique opportunity for psychologists in this country of Aotearoa/New Zealand to recognise other ways of describing events, which will lead to creative practices and enable the health and welfare resources to get to those who most need them, on their own terms. It would also enable other people, other workers from other cultures to develop new paradigms, and new shifts in our field. This will not lead to the abandonment of social science, but it will enable that body of knowledge, to sit appropriately along side other realms of knowledge such as gender knowledge, and cultural knowledge, without dominating. A new experience for the social scientists, but I suspect a liberating one!

year: 1993