Filtering by
- All Subjects: Social Justice
- Creators: School of Human Evolution & Social Change
- Creators: Colbern, Allan
Elite experience and careers in judged female sports complicate the binary categories of retirement while they are especially exposed to cultures of abuse, pressure and subjectivity. This thesis is comprised of multiple voices and experiences from the elite female athletic perspective, including my autoethnographic narrative. Highlighted and discussed are the topics of sexual assault and abuse, family pressure on children to do and excel at sport, the National Team experience representing the United States and subjected bodies and judging. It is an aim of this thesis to culminate all of those factors in the final chapter and hold that the experience and the cultures of athletic identity within synchronized swimming, gymnastics and figure skating not only cannot be explained by current research on athletic identity through retirement but have the capability to retire undeveloped young women by overdeveloped athletic identities. Through a sampling of voices and experiences across different female judged sports, over three decades, the reader will observe similarities that cause these sports to have a culture of solidarity through the aspects they hold in common with each other. The narrative highlights pivotal moments in the lives of the elite female athlete within these sports, which add to the calculation of their athletic identities and the lack of their personal identities. Through reflection and analyses of not only my story, but the interviewees from my original research and that of Joan Ryan’s as well, I aim to voice a mutual experience of elite athletes. Consisting of multiple factors throughout many years we will see through my autoethnography, paralleling with other voices and experiences, how it all intersects and contributes to this: Who am I now and where do I go from here?
For the past six months, I have been working with Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro on the Tempe’s People’s Budget coalition. I served as a member on the research team as well as a temporary member of the Black Lives Matter’s nucleus leadership team. I joined weekly meetings for both groups, and conducted research on city budget proposals, initiatives, and resources. I also lead discussions and conversations about progress, next steps, and goals of the coalition with over 50 volunteers within the coalition. The Tempe’s People Budget crafted a survey in late October and sent it out mid-November to members of the Tempe community, asking them what community resources they would use and which resources and investments they believed the city of Tempe should commit to. After five months of survey collection, we presented a preliminary budget proposal to Tempe’s financial office for consideration for the 2022-2023 budget, using data from 318 survey responses. With the creation of the survey among the adaption of the Tempe’s coalition, we wanted to look at what preventive community resource most respondents wanted Tempe to reinvest in. We found that the majority of survey respondents would like investments in renewable energy, housing stability, and alternatives to police. It is the city’s job to protect and serve all members of their communities, and public safety should be prioritized by investing in preventive measures instead of remedial punishments. Public safety concerns would be most effectively resolved by addressing issues such as: little to no income, housing instability, lack of access to food and water and other basic necessities to survive. Currently, Tempe is investing in the police, who most often only serve punishments.