Our Research
We interrogate critically how young people embody issues of gender, sexuality, race, ableism, and sizeism and the intersectionality of these social categories in physical activity and health and express them in their engagement with and/or disengagement from physical culture. Adopting critical and constructivist theories, we investigate PE classes, gyms, and other contexts of health, fitness, or recreation as sites of critical inquiries. We are thus committed to re-constructing PE curricula and other contexts of physical culture as sites of pedagogical resistance, social change, and transformation.
Our research employs qualitative methodologies that position children and young people as active agents, enabling them to voice, express, and represent their experiences in meaningful, creative, and contextualized ways. We adopt research methodologies that have the potential to make inequalities and inequities visible in order to create social change. In our visual research, we use community-based arts centers, schools, and art galleries as sites of public and critical pedagogy for social change, showcasing participants’ own visual representations of the significance of physical activity in their lives. We use art exhibitions as pedagogical spaces for youth’s expression in the attempt to legitimate, recognize, and communicate the ways in which they talk, feel, and represent their embodied experiences to the public, beyond the boundaries of academia.