Search

In 2014 I attended a symposium concerning Early Career Academics (ECAs) in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy. I was struck by the dominance of a particular theme at that symposium--that is, how to obtain a position and survive in academia. The aim of this paper is to use an inciting moment that occurred at this symposium as a means to confront some of the broader issues that I thought were at stake. Specifically I seek to interrogate the possible consequences of thinking about ECAs and academia in neoliberal terms, for the future of the field--a field that has a strong critical tradition. To this end I utilise autoethnographic techniques to connect the personal to the cultural and attempt to describe and analyse my story of becoming and being a critical scholar of sport, in a neoliberal context.

In this paper, the biographical sporting narratives produced about a selection of New Zealand's most successful women swimmers are interrogated and analyzed. It is argued that biographical narratives, ironically, pay insufficient attention to the complexity and fluidity of 'character'. As such, it is suggested that the interrogation of fictional characters is a useful way of exploring the cultural conditions of possibility which shape the (re)production of sporting heroines. To this end, the narrative of a fictional swimmer, Alex, is compared and contrasted to the biographical sports narratives of New Zealand women swimmers, and the untapped political possibilities of a fictional sports heroine are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]