Untangling Complexities (Asynchronous - Online Only)
The Role of Individual Autonomy in the Co-Construction of Team Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lauren Pierce
It is a well-known fact that individual autonomy is essential in self-regulatory behavior and motivation. However, it is lesser known how individuals leverage their autonomy within groups to create, advocate, and consolidate team culture and identity. This study follows four teams of volleyball players within a single club as they navigate the complexity of forging group identity. We aim to further understand the role of individual autonomy in the sport-specific creation of team and club culture through a co-regulation framework that explores the unique roles of the individual, social, and cultural constructs in emergent identity formation. Athletes were given a survey analyzing motivation and identity at three different points during the season. Extensive field notes at games, team meetings, and practices were applied to theoretical coding systems to add group context to the athlete’s individual responses. This study illustrates the importance of the individual athlete’s role in capitalizing on existing moments of tension that the team must navigate together as they continuously redefine their identity in the face of new and unique challenges. Research found that there are both adaptive and maladaptive ways that individual autonomy can be used to leverage tension for productive group affects. This work illustrates that a sense of individual autonomy is essential in fostering adaptive group tension during the season. The resulting tension can be utilized to reaffirm essential aspects of identity as teams confront new challenges. Coaches and players should embrace autonomous behavior to foster growth in existing team sociocultural structures throughout the season.
Sport, Art, or Both?: Examining Conceptualizations of Dance in Ontario University Athletic Contexts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Natalie Tacuri
Is dance a sport? Is dance an art? Can dance be categorized as both? The controversy surrounding dance’s categorization has been an ongoing debate since the early 1970s. With no definite conclusion to this debate, dancers do not have a clear designation as either artists and/or athletes. As such, unresolved challenges remain in the perceived value and significance of dance, particularly in postsecondary contexts. The inconclusive nature of this debate has significant implications for competitive dancers in postsecondary, as their experiences as student-athletes and opportunities for participation in sport contexts are largely impacted by conceptualizations of dance by various stakeholders in university athletics. Taking this into account, this research examines perceptions surrounding dance as a sport, art, or combination of both in universities across Ontario. Competitive dancers, dance coaches, and athletic department staff in postsecondary participated in online surveys and interviews to share their individual beliefs, knowledge, and understandings about competitive dance and the ways dancers can occupy spaces as artists and athletes. Perceptions of dance from each group of key informants proved to be dependent on a range of factors within universities and across individual participants. Most participants stated they viewed dance as both an art and a sport but demonstrated tension in how dancers occupied spaces as legitimate athletes within postsecondary institutions. While participants indicated openness to the idea of dance as a sport and dancers as athletes, the ways in which this would be actually attainable at the university-level is hindered by various institutional and systemic barriers.
Sports Calendars and Competing Temporal Ideologies: The Implications of Organized Athletics in Late Colonial Kenyan Society View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chepchirchir Tirop
My paper explores how the institutionalization of modern athletics in late colonial Kenya led to contestations over different understandings of time and productivity. Focusing primarily on archival readings from the Kenya National Archives, I show how scheduling of athletics and indeed other sporting events that accompanied institutionalization revealed competing ideals about the "proper" use of Africans' time and energy. From concerns about the athletic calendar interfering with schooling to questions about employees taking leave to participate in sporting events, the introduction of organized sports represented a clash of values. Yet these ideological clashes around sports were also compounded by weather and climatic considerations thus highlighting the central role the environment played in these discussions. These collisions of ideas among Kenyan athletes, colonial administrators, and employers help us appreciate the role of modern athletics in not only shaping late colonial society but also the influence of these administrative infrastructures on the place of women in athletics. As many African women were already excluded from these employment and educational institutions, institutionalization of sports via schools, the army and other private institutions contributed to locking out African women from the world of athletics and to their late entry into the sport. My paper considers all these different but related angles to show the implications of organized athletics in late colonial society.
Featured From Nichomachean to Cyborgean - the Un-Bio-Ethical Dimension of the Olympics and Paralympics: Bioethical Concerns Regarding Respect for Autonomy and Power Dynamics among the Doctor/Coach/Athlete Triad in Pursuit of Human Performance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Constantine Psimopoulos
The essence of the Paralympics is “the pursuit of human excellence through the dedicated perfection of each person’s natural talents”. In the realm of health, disability, law and bioethics, scholars have sought to explore the impact that disability has on legal, medical and social structures, and with the Paralympics being a socially structured phenomenon it is fair play for such applications of scholarly endeavor. Can body alternations ever be justified? Does society accept bodies that are more than just biological? Accepting that cheating is fundamentally contrary to that spirit of sport, then why is it that those Olympic rings are tarnished by a plethora of negative examples and un-sports-person-like behaviors which permeate the very fabric of Paralympic sport, while society blatantly ignores all these un-ethical challenges in the sacrificial temple of spectacle, record breaking and revenue making broadcasting marvels pursuant to the need for a creation of modern day heroes?
