Rebecca Olive
Biographic Data
| ID | 257361 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Olive |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Olive |
| SIGNATURE | OLIVE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2980-3969 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The blue Un/Commons: Tracing new directions in research on outdoor swimming, health and place
This discussion provides an introduction to our special issue, The Blue Un/Commons: Tracing new directions in research on outdoor swimming, health and place. This introduction provides a rationale and overview of the social and research contexts the special issue is immersed in, including the growing multi-disciplinary literature on the established health and wellbeing swimming benefits of swimming. Our aim is to extend this 'health and wellbeing…
Water is a conductor: Outdoor swimming as social infrastructure of care and connectivity
Clean and safe: Swimming ethically in compromised times and polluted places
Swimming with sharks: Drones, social media and ocean relationalities
Shifts toward more relational understandings of human-shark encounters among ocean users (e.g., swimmers and surfers) have been emerging in Australia. Alongside community debates about shark nets, culls, whale migration, over-fishing and the growing numbers of ocean users in attacks and encounters, many ocean-users have articulated more nuanced understandings of sharks, which challenge the biased representations of shark behaviours represented in…
‘It’s pretty sad if I’m just betting by myself … ’: Navigating shame and stigma in everyday sports betting
Smartphone technologies and prominent marketing campaigns continue to contribute to the growth of sports betting in contemporary Australia, shifting the practice from pubs and clubs into the domestic and intimate lives of young bettors. This article seeks to build on prior studies of sports betting in the lives of young Australian men by focusing on how gambling shame and stigma is navigated by bettors and their romantic partners. Data collected …
Concussion's Past: An Introduction
There is little doubt that one of the major issues facing contemporary sport is concussion. Actions by federal, state, and provincial governments in several nations over the last decade are one prominent indicator of the public concern about sport-related concussion among athletes, parents, politicians, coaches, spectators, and sporting organizations. Scientific and medical specialists have played a critical role in the research, practice, and pu…
The challenges of 'researching with responsibility: Developing intersectional reflexivity for understanding surfing, place and community in Aotearoa New Zealand
Located within feminist scholarship on sport, leisure and physical cultures, this article explores our attempts to understand what conducting 'research with responsibility' means as White, settler-coloniser, immigrant women researching surfing, place and community in Aotearoa New Zealand. Taking inspiration from Hamilton's 'intersectional reflexivity' and Māori feminist scholars' discussion of (de)colonizing methodologies, we discuss the developm…
Celebrating 30 years of the CSAA
Swimming and surfing in ocean ecologies: Encounter and vulnerability in nature-based sport and physical activity
To date, research about human-environmental health and wellbeing thinking has tended to centre the health and wellbeing benefits for humans from time spent in nature. That is, we remain most concerned with the benefits of ‘nature’ to human health. However, nature-based sports and physical activities, like swimming and surfing, challenge such human-centerdness by ‘resituating’ swimmers and surfers in multispecies ecologies. By creating opportuniti…
Visibility and Vulnerability on Instagram: Negotiating Safety in Women’s Online-Offline Fitness Spaces
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagram. Using qualitative interview data, we explore women’s understanding and practices of keeping themselves and others safe when sharing information-rich images about their exercising bodies and fitness activities. Drawing on literatures from feminist leisure, sport and media studies, this article advances discussions about exercising women’s negotiati…
A feminist embodied ethics of social media use: Corporeal vulnerability and relational care practices
This article adopts a feminist relational orientation to investigate the care practices that women develop when producing and engaging with body-focussed content online. We propose and argue for an embodied ethics of social media use to understand women’s enactments and exchanges as they relate to shared corporeal concerns. Drawing on qualitative interview data, and using Judith Butler’s understanding of corporeal vulnerability as the basis for m…
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted: Searching for the value of metrics and altmetrics in sociology of sport journals
Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the 'performance' of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for asse…
In deep: At one with the water, with all that entails
Doing feminist physical cultural research in digital spaces: Reflections, learnings and ways forward
In this article we draw on our varied experiences of conducting feminist sport and leisure scholarship in digital spaces to offer some reflections, learnings and ways forward for navigating the challenges of digital and social media research. The paper outlines our methodological and ethical relationships to doing feminist research with and about women and girls, taking Margaret McClaren’s activist lens as a starting point to consider issues of p…
Coastal Communities, Leisure and Wellbeing: Advancing a Trans-Disciplinary Agenda for Understanding Ocean-Human Relationships in Aotearoa New Zealand
Commentators are advocating for research to better understand relationships between healthy coastal ecosystems and human wellbeing. Doing so requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches across humanities, arts, social sciences, and science and technology disciplines. These approaches include culturally diverse knowledge systems, such as indigenous ones, that locate sustainable use of and relationships to marine ecosystems. This paper contribu…
Sustainability in the Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum: An ecofeminist analysis
Inspired by the activism of young people in response to growing calls for climate justice, this discussion examines the rich possibilities to more meaningfully engage with the interconnections between human and environmental health in the AC:HPE. We explore how the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority is articulated throughout the Health and Physical Education learning area of the Australian Curriculum (AC:HPE). Adopting an ecofeminist framew…
Understanding Blue Spaces: Sport, Bodies, Wellbeing, and the Sea
This article introduces the special issue (JSSI 45.1 and 45.2) on 'Understanding Blue Spaces' which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems…
Questioning representations of athletes with elevated testosterone levels in elite women's sports: A Critical Policy Analysis
Sport sociologists are often required to interpret, question and respond to the ways in which fairness and eligibility concerns in elite sports are represented in policy frameworks produced by sports governing bodies. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis framework, 'what is the problem represented to be?', this paper explores the importance in developing a critical eye and reading about representations of women athletes with particu…
The Trouble with Newcomers: Women, Localism and the Politics of Surfing
In Australian surfing, localism is a practice through which surfers claim authority to protect their surf breaks and access to waves from newcomers and outsiders. While localism has been shown to be a central component of the cultural identities of men who surf, the relationships to and experiences of localism of women who surf have rarely been the subject of critical analysis. In this discussion, I build on Krista Comer’s use of “girl localism” …
Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure
For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls w…
The Critical Surf Studies Reader
Embodied pedagogies in human movement studies classrooms: A postgraduate pathway into teaching and learning
Studying is above all thinking about experience, and thinking about experience is the best way to think accurately.—Paulo Freire (1985, 3, in Offord 2016, 62)Contemporary cultural studies is engage
Women in Action Sport Cultures: Identity, Politics and Experience
Young, white men have dominated action sports for many years, yet women have refused to accept positions on the margins of these unique sporting cultures. Developing in a different context to many tra
Going surfing/doing research: Learning how to negotiate cultural politics from women who surf
As a consequence of the dominance of men in recreational Australian surfing culture, the productive potential of the relationships between women who surf has been largely overlooked. However, as a (growing) minority, women who surf tend to know other women who surf, making relationships between women significant. This discussion explores the tensions in how women who surf in Byron Bay avoid, and yet engage in, the male-dominated politics of recre…
Seascapes: Shaped by the sea
The core theme of Mike Brown and Barbara Humberstone’s edited book, Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea, ‘is the way that lived experiences with the sea shape who we are’ (Brown & Humberstone, pp. 1–2). F
Understanding Blue Spaces: Sport, Bodies, Wellbeing, and the Sea
This article introduces the special issue (JSSI 45.1 and 45.2) on 'Understanding Blue Spaces' which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems…
Women's recreational surfing: A patronising experience
Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the …
Negotiating the ‘F-Word’ in the Field: Doing Feminist Ethnography in Action Sport Cultures
This paper examines the potential of social theory for enhancing researcher reflexivity and praxis in the ethnographic field. More specifically, we advocate the potential of feminist interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “regulated liberties” for helping critical ethnographers navigate some of the embodied political and ethical tensions and challenges encountered in male-dominated physical cultures. Drawing upon examples from our fieldw…
Reframing Surfing: Physical Culture in Online Spaces
The social media app Instagram has become a popular everyday way to share visual representations of surfing culture and experiences. Providing an alternative to mainstream surf media, images posted on Instagram by women who surf recreationally both disrupt and reinforce the existing sexualisation and differentiation of women in surf culture. Images themselves are not necessarily resistant, yet women are asserting themselves as a voice of surf cul…
Sustainability in the Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum: An ecofeminist analysis
Inspired by the activism of young people in response to growing calls for climate justice, this discussion examines the rich possibilities to more meaningfully engage with the interconnections between human and environmental health in the AC:HPE. We explore how the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority is articulated throughout the Health and Physical Education learning area of the Australian Curriculum (AC:HPE). Adopting an ecofeminist framew…
The Trouble with Newcomers: Women, Localism and the Politics of Surfing
In Australian surfing, localism is a practice through which surfers claim authority to protect their surf breaks and access to waves from newcomers and outsiders. While localism has been shown to be a central component of the cultural identities of men who surf, the relationships to and experiences of localism of women who surf have rarely been the subject of critical analysis. In this discussion, I build on Krista Comer’s use of “girl localism” …
Visibility and Vulnerability on Instagram: Negotiating Safety in Women’s Online-Offline Fitness Spaces
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagram. Using qualitative interview data, we explore women’s understanding and practices of keeping themselves and others safe when sharing information-rich images about their exercising bodies and fitness activities. Drawing on literatures from feminist leisure, sport and media studies, this article advances discussions about exercising women’s negotiati…
Going surfing/doing research: Learning how to negotiate cultural politics from women who surf
As a consequence of the dominance of men in recreational Australian surfing culture, the productive potential of the relationships between women who surf has been largely overlooked. However, as a (growing) minority, women who surf tend to know other women who surf, making relationships between women significant. This discussion explores the tensions in how women who surf in Byron Bay avoid, and yet engage in, the male-dominated politics of recre…
Swimming and surfing in ocean ecologies: Encounter and vulnerability in nature-based sport and physical activity
To date, research about human-environmental health and wellbeing thinking has tended to centre the health and wellbeing benefits for humans from time spent in nature. That is, we remain most concerned with the benefits of ‘nature’ to human health. However, nature-based sports and physical activities, like swimming and surfing, challenge such human-centerdness by ‘resituating’ swimmers and surfers in multispecies ecologies. By creating opportuniti…
Making friends with the neighbours’: Blogging as a research method
During my research about women and surfing, I have found writing a blog useful as a tool for doing research in the cultural context of surfing. More than a simply a space to increase transparency in my ethnographic research process, blogging became a method of its own. Linking Elizabeth St Pierre’s discussion of research ‘folds’ with Elspeth Probyn’s encouragement to ‘think the social through myself’, blogging helped to address feminist concerns …
A feminist embodied ethics of social media use: Corporeal vulnerability and relational care practices
This article adopts a feminist relational orientation to investigate the care practices that women develop when producing and engaging with body-focussed content online. We propose and argue for an embodied ethics of social media use to understand women’s enactments and exchanges as they relate to shared corporeal concerns. Drawing on qualitative interview data, and using Judith Butler’s understanding of corporeal vulnerability as the basis for m…
Questioning representations of athletes with elevated testosterone levels in elite women's sports: A Critical Policy Analysis
Sport sociologists are often required to interpret, question and respond to the ways in which fairness and eligibility concerns in elite sports are represented in policy frameworks produced by sports governing bodies. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis framework, 'what is the problem represented to be?', this paper explores the importance in developing a critical eye and reading about representations of women athletes with particu…
Embodied pedagogies in human movement studies classrooms: A postgraduate pathway into teaching and learning
Studying is above all thinking about experience, and thinking about experience is the best way to think accurately.—Paulo Freire (1985, 3, in Offord 2016, 62)Contemporary cultural studies is engage
Water is a conductor: Outdoor swimming as social infrastructure of care and connectivity
Clean and safe: Swimming ethically in compromised times and polluted places
The challenges of 'researching with responsibility: Developing intersectional reflexivity for understanding surfing, place and community in Aotearoa New Zealand
Located within feminist scholarship on sport, leisure and physical cultures, this article explores our attempts to understand what conducting 'research with responsibility' means as White, settler-coloniser, immigrant women researching surfing, place and community in Aotearoa New Zealand. Taking inspiration from Hamilton's 'intersectional reflexivity' and Māori feminist scholars' discussion of (de)colonizing methodologies, we discuss the developm…
Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure
For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls w…
Swimming with sharks: Drones, social media and ocean relationalities
Shifts toward more relational understandings of human-shark encounters among ocean users (e.g., swimmers and surfers) have been emerging in Australia. Alongside community debates about shark nets, culls, whale migration, over-fishing and the growing numbers of ocean users in attacks and encounters, many ocean-users have articulated more nuanced understandings of sharks, which challenge the biased representations of shark behaviours represented in…
The Critical Surf Studies Reader
War, State and Society
Negotiating the ‘F-Word’ in the Field: Doing Feminist Ethnography in Action Sport Cultures
This paper examines the potential of social theory for enhancing researcher reflexivity and praxis in the ethnographic field. More specifically, we advocate the potential of feminist interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “regulated liberties” for helping critical ethnographers navigate some of the embodied political and ethical tensions and challenges encountered in male-dominated physical cultures. Drawing upon examples from our fieldw…
Making friends with the neighbours’: Blogging as a research method
During my research about women and surfing, I have found writing a blog useful as a tool for doing research in the cultural context of surfing. More than a simply a space to increase transparency in my ethnographic research process, blogging became a method of its own. Linking Elizabeth St Pierre’s discussion of research ‘folds’ with Elspeth Probyn’s encouragement to ‘think the social through myself’, blogging helped to address feminist concerns …
The Power, Politics, and Potential of Feminist Sports History: A Multi-Generational Dialogue
This article considers the role that feminism has played in the development of sport history. More than writing “women’s sport history,” “feminist sport history” critically (re)engages issues of theory, method, and representation in the ways we approach historical scholarship. However, feminism remains a diverse area of thought that includes both political and personal aspects, which creates differences in the perspectives that feminist scholars …
Women's recreational surfing: A patronising experience
Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the …
Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing
For many organizations, athletes, fans, and participants, there is a continuing belief that sport and politics should not be mixed. Of course, sport and politics have long been linked explicitly an
Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawai’i, California, and Australia
Book Review| July 01 2015 Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawai’i, California, and Australia Warren, Andrew and Chris Gibson. Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawai’i, California, and Australia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Pp. xiii+261. Index and illustrations. $55.00 cb. $28 pb. Rebecca Olive Rebecca Olive Search for other works by this au…
Reframing Surfing: Physical Culture in Online Spaces
The social media app Instagram has become a popular everyday way to share visual representations of surfing culture and experiences. Providing an alternative to mainstream surf media, images posted on Instagram by women who surf recreationally both disrupt and reinforce the existing sexualisation and differentiation of women in surf culture. Images themselves are not necessarily resistant, yet women are asserting themselves as a voice of surf cul…
Women in Action Sport Cultures: Identity, Politics and Experience
Young, white men have dominated action sports for many years, yet women have refused to accept positions on the margins of these unique sporting cultures. Developing in a different context to many tra
Going surfing/doing research: Learning how to negotiate cultural politics from women who surf
As a consequence of the dominance of men in recreational Australian surfing culture, the productive potential of the relationships between women who surf has been largely overlooked. However, as a (growing) minority, women who surf tend to know other women who surf, making relationships between women significant. This discussion explores the tensions in how women who surf in Byron Bay avoid, and yet engage in, the male-dominated politics of recre…
Seascapes: Shaped by the sea
The core theme of Mike Brown and Barbara Humberstone’s edited book, Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea, ‘is the way that lived experiences with the sea shape who we are’ (Brown & Humberstone, pp. 1–2). F
Embodied pedagogies in human movement studies classrooms: A postgraduate pathway into teaching and learning
Studying is above all thinking about experience, and thinking about experience is the best way to think accurately.—Paulo Freire (1985, 3, in Offord 2016, 62)Contemporary cultural studies is engage
The Trouble with Newcomers: Women, Localism and the Politics of Surfing
In Australian surfing, localism is a practice through which surfers claim authority to protect their surf breaks and access to waves from newcomers and outsiders. While localism has been shown to be a central component of the cultural identities of men who surf, the relationships to and experiences of localism of women who surf have rarely been the subject of critical analysis. In this discussion, I build on Krista Comer’s use of “girl localism” …
Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure
For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls w…
The Critical Surf Studies Reader
Questioning representations of athletes with elevated testosterone levels in elite women's sports: A Critical Policy Analysis
Sport sociologists are often required to interpret, question and respond to the ways in which fairness and eligibility concerns in elite sports are represented in policy frameworks produced by sports governing bodies. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis framework, 'what is the problem represented to be?', this paper explores the importance in developing a critical eye and reading about representations of women athletes with particu…
Doing feminist physical cultural research in digital spaces: Reflections, learnings and ways forward
In this article we draw on our varied experiences of conducting feminist sport and leisure scholarship in digital spaces to offer some reflections, learnings and ways forward for navigating the challenges of digital and social media research. The paper outlines our methodological and ethical relationships to doing feminist research with and about women and girls, taking Margaret McClaren’s activist lens as a starting point to consider issues of p…
Coastal Communities, Leisure and Wellbeing: Advancing a Trans-Disciplinary Agenda for Understanding Ocean-Human Relationships in Aotearoa New Zealand
Commentators are advocating for research to better understand relationships between healthy coastal ecosystems and human wellbeing. Doing so requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches across humanities, arts, social sciences, and science and technology disciplines. These approaches include culturally diverse knowledge systems, such as indigenous ones, that locate sustainable use of and relationships to marine ecosystems. This paper contribu…
Sustainability in the Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum: An ecofeminist analysis
Inspired by the activism of young people in response to growing calls for climate justice, this discussion examines the rich possibilities to more meaningfully engage with the interconnections between human and environmental health in the AC:HPE. We explore how the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority is articulated throughout the Health and Physical Education learning area of the Australian Curriculum (AC:HPE). Adopting an ecofeminist framew…
Understanding Blue Spaces: Sport, Bodies, Wellbeing, and the Sea
This article introduces the special issue (JSSI 45.1 and 45.2) on 'Understanding Blue Spaces' which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems…
In deep: At one with the water, with all that entails
Celebrating 30 years of the CSAA
Swimming and surfing in ocean ecologies: Encounter and vulnerability in nature-based sport and physical activity
To date, research about human-environmental health and wellbeing thinking has tended to centre the health and wellbeing benefits for humans from time spent in nature. That is, we remain most concerned with the benefits of ‘nature’ to human health. However, nature-based sports and physical activities, like swimming and surfing, challenge such human-centerdness by ‘resituating’ swimmers and surfers in multispecies ecologies. By creating opportuniti…
Visibility and Vulnerability on Instagram: Negotiating Safety in Women’s Online-Offline Fitness Spaces
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagram. Using qualitative interview data, we explore women’s understanding and practices of keeping themselves and others safe when sharing information-rich images about their exercising bodies and fitness activities. Drawing on literatures from feminist leisure, sport and media studies, this article advances discussions about exercising women’s negotiati…
A feminist embodied ethics of social media use: Corporeal vulnerability and relational care practices
This article adopts a feminist relational orientation to investigate the care practices that women develop when producing and engaging with body-focussed content online. We propose and argue for an embodied ethics of social media use to understand women’s enactments and exchanges as they relate to shared corporeal concerns. Drawing on qualitative interview data, and using Judith Butler’s understanding of corporeal vulnerability as the basis for m…
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (17 works) · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking (16 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Social science (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works)