J Denison
Biographic Data
| ID | 58311 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Denison |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Denison |
| SIGNATURE | DENISON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-4049-3152 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 148 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Broad Shoulders
This brief narrative represents a tribute to Norman Denzin’s leadership
After the Dust Settles: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes' "Re-orientation" to Exercise
One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance …
Beat the Game: A Foucauldian exploration of coaching differently in an elite rugby academy
Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of game-centred approaches in coaching contexts, this study explored the impact of a unique problem-based learn…
Breaking Coaching's Rules: Transforming the Body, Sport, and Performance
Who knew that doing the wrong things could make everything so right?' There can be little doubt that sports' dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body exerts a strong influence on coaches. Yet, on closer examination, this articulation and the practices it produces are not as straightforward as most coaches and scholars assume. Within the sociocultural study of coaching, scholars have drawn on Michel Foucault's disciplinary framewor…
Jogging not running: A narrative approach to exploring ‘exercise as leisure’ after a life in elite football
As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their post-sport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approa…
How power moves: A Foucauldian analysis of (in)effective coaching
Knowing how to coach effectively is one ever-present truth across all sports and yet our previous research based on the work of Michel Foucault has illustrated how the effectiveness of endurance running coaches' everyday coaching practices is limited by their use of various disciplinary techniques. Missing from these analyses was any consideration of Foucault's conceptualization of how modern power works through the disciplinary instruments or th…
Challenge and relief: A Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of retirement from professional association football in the United Kingdom
The aim of this study was to consider the retirement experiences of British male professional association footballers by utilising Foucault's analysis of discipline discussed in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Specifically, we drew upon Foucault to consider how, through the various techniques and instruments of discipline, the professional football context produces 'docile footballing bodies' and how this might influence a player'…
Social theory and narrative research: A point of view
In this short essay, I explore in a narrative style the following question: do narrative analyses of sport and exercise need to engage more fully with social theory in order to become more forceful in their arguments? More specifically, to have real impact, and to achieve what we are especially trained to do as qualitative social scientists, should our research narratives examine more explicitly—less showing and more telling—the complex relations…
Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’
Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes' unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given th…
Toward New Conversations Between Sociology and Psychology
“Messy Texts”, or the Unexplainable Performance: Reading Bodies' Evidence
Following global efforts to impose an orthodoxy on knowledge generation that is above all, evidence-based, a number of social science scholars have begun to question the very ground on which evidence has been given its cultural and canonical purchase (e.g., Denzin & Giardina, 2008). For coach educators, this debate raises a number of relevant questions. For example, how should evidence be represented when researching coaches' effectiveness? Or, h…
Planning, practice and performance: The discursive formation of coaches' knowledge
This paper takes as its starting point that coaches' efforts at planning their athletes' training are a complex practice involving so many variables that the logic of how they all ‘fit together’ to produce a peak performance is never obvious or clear. However, many coaches operate as if their athletes' training programmes can be assembled in a coherent, rational manner, or as if ‘systems’ exist to make planning an orderly sequence of steps or sta…
Social Theory for Coaches: A Foucauldian Reading of One Athlete's Poor Performance
This paper explores my “sense making” when a male cross-country runner was coaching performed below expectation. My initial understanding of his poor performance was to blame him for “lacking” the appropriate mental toughness. As a result, I located the “problem” within him and subsequently ignored many of my own taken-for-granted coaching practices as perhaps contributing to his poor performance. In this paper, provide an alternative reading of …
Inhibiting Progress: The Record of the Four-Minute Mile
In this paper I explore the long-standing significance of the four-minute mile in line with the meaning it still holds today by discussing the concept of nostalgia. Further, I cite material from a series of in-depth interviews with six sub-four-minute milers. Every miler I spoke to remarked on how momentous and memorable running under four minutes was. And it is precisely how idealized sporting memories such as this form and the effect they have …
The Way We Ran: Reimagining Research and the Self
This piece is a performative homage to Norman Denzin's recent work on performance ethnography. Housed within the framing devices characterizing the author's collegiate track and field teammates, this piece explores writing, running, standpoint epistemologies, and the ongoing performance of self. Finally, the piece examines the tensions of lived lives and the potential for reflexivity and transformation within autoethnographic texts
The Press Conference as a Performance: Representing Haile Gebrselassie
Pre-event sports press conferences remain largely unexamined by sport sociologists. In this article we present a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of a recent press conference staged on behalf of the Ethiopian long-distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie. We first discuss the workings of whiteness in relation to the ways in which a black Ethiopian distance runner is imagined by Western sports journalists. Then, drawing on the work of a number of perfo…
Gift
Introduction: Imagining Sociological Narratives
See Spot Run: Movement as an Object of Textual Analysis
As physically active people and researchers of physical activity, the authors have trouble translating their movement experiences into words. To them, words seem inadequate for expressing the physical, therefore, "How does one research movement?" The authors first questioned textual representations of movement and sport in a 1996 conference presentation. This article includes their personal movement experiences as a dancer and a runner, respectiv…
Sport Narratives
Recently there has been a call for alternative styles of representation within the social sciences. This includes using fiction, poetry, and drama to convey people's lived experiences. Whereas many social scientists continue to theorize about experimenting with writing and research and to argue the benefits, few have provided examples of how this might look. With this article, the author attempts to fill that void by presenting three short storie…
Sport Narratives
Recently there has been a call for alternative styles of representation within the social sciences. This includes using fiction, poetry, and drama to convey people's lived experiences. Whereas many social scientists continue to theorize about experimenting with writing and research and to argue the benefits, few have provided examples of how this might look. With this article, the author attempts to fill that void by presenting three short storie…
Introduction: Imagining Sociological Narratives
Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’
Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes' unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given th…
How power moves: A Foucauldian analysis of (in)effective coaching
Knowing how to coach effectively is one ever-present truth across all sports and yet our previous research based on the work of Michel Foucault has illustrated how the effectiveness of endurance running coaches' everyday coaching practices is limited by their use of various disciplinary techniques. Missing from these analyses was any consideration of Foucault's conceptualization of how modern power works through the disciplinary instruments or th…
Planning, practice and performance: The discursive formation of coaches' knowledge
This paper takes as its starting point that coaches' efforts at planning their athletes' training are a complex practice involving so many variables that the logic of how they all ‘fit together’ to produce a peak performance is never obvious or clear. However, many coaches operate as if their athletes' training programmes can be assembled in a coherent, rational manner, or as if ‘systems’ exist to make planning an orderly sequence of steps or sta…
Breaking Coaching's Rules: Transforming the Body, Sport, and Performance
Who knew that doing the wrong things could make everything so right?' There can be little doubt that sports' dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body exerts a strong influence on coaches. Yet, on closer examination, this articulation and the practices it produces are not as straightforward as most coaches and scholars assume. Within the sociocultural study of coaching, scholars have drawn on Michel Foucault's disciplinary framewor…
The Way We Ran: Reimagining Research and the Self
This piece is a performative homage to Norman Denzin's recent work on performance ethnography. Housed within the framing devices characterizing the author's collegiate track and field teammates, this piece explores writing, running, standpoint epistemologies, and the ongoing performance of self. Finally, the piece examines the tensions of lived lives and the potential for reflexivity and transformation within autoethnographic texts
Challenge and relief: A Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of retirement from professional association football in the United Kingdom
The aim of this study was to consider the retirement experiences of British male professional association footballers by utilising Foucault's analysis of discipline discussed in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Specifically, we drew upon Foucault to consider how, through the various techniques and instruments of discipline, the professional football context produces 'docile footballing bodies' and how this might influence a player'…
See Spot Run: Movement as an Object of Textual Analysis
As physically active people and researchers of physical activity, the authors have trouble translating their movement experiences into words. To them, words seem inadequate for expressing the physical, therefore, "How does one research movement?" The authors first questioned textual representations of movement and sport in a 1996 conference presentation. This article includes their personal movement experiences as a dancer and a runner, respectiv…
Jogging not running: A narrative approach to exploring ‘exercise as leisure’ after a life in elite football
As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their post-sport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approa…
Social theory and narrative research: A point of view
In this short essay, I explore in a narrative style the following question: do narrative analyses of sport and exercise need to engage more fully with social theory in order to become more forceful in their arguments? More specifically, to have real impact, and to achieve what we are especially trained to do as qualitative social scientists, should our research narratives examine more explicitly—less showing and more telling—the complex relations…
After the Dust Settles: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes' "Re-orientation" to Exercise
One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance …
Beat the Game: A Foucauldian exploration of coaching differently in an elite rugby academy
Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of game-centred approaches in coaching contexts, this study explored the impact of a unique problem-based learn…
Inhibiting Progress: The Record of the Four-Minute Mile
In this paper I explore the long-standing significance of the four-minute mile in line with the meaning it still holds today by discussing the concept of nostalgia. Further, I cite material from a series of in-depth interviews with six sub-four-minute milers. Every miler I spoke to remarked on how momentous and memorable running under four minutes was. And it is precisely how idealized sporting memories such as this form and the effect they have …
Gift
Sport Narratives
Recently there has been a call for alternative styles of representation within the social sciences. This includes using fiction, poetry, and drama to convey people's lived experiences. Whereas many social scientists continue to theorize about experimenting with writing and research and to argue the benefits, few have provided examples of how this might look. With this article, the author attempts to fill that void by presenting three short storie…
Gift
Introduction: Imagining Sociological Narratives
See Spot Run: Movement as an Object of Textual Analysis
As physically active people and researchers of physical activity, the authors have trouble translating their movement experiences into words. To them, words seem inadequate for expressing the physical, therefore, "How does one research movement?" The authors first questioned textual representations of movement and sport in a 1996 conference presentation. This article includes their personal movement experiences as a dancer and a runner, respectiv…
The Press Conference as a Performance: Representing Haile Gebrselassie
Pre-event sports press conferences remain largely unexamined by sport sociologists. In this article we present a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of a recent press conference staged on behalf of the Ethiopian long-distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie. We first discuss the workings of whiteness in relation to the ways in which a black Ethiopian distance runner is imagined by Western sports journalists. Then, drawing on the work of a number of perfo…
Inhibiting Progress: The Record of the Four-Minute Mile
In this paper I explore the long-standing significance of the four-minute mile in line with the meaning it still holds today by discussing the concept of nostalgia. Further, I cite material from a series of in-depth interviews with six sub-four-minute milers. Every miler I spoke to remarked on how momentous and memorable running under four minutes was. And it is precisely how idealized sporting memories such as this form and the effect they have …
The Way We Ran: Reimagining Research and the Self
This piece is a performative homage to Norman Denzin's recent work on performance ethnography. Housed within the framing devices characterizing the author's collegiate track and field teammates, this piece explores writing, running, standpoint epistemologies, and the ongoing performance of self. Finally, the piece examines the tensions of lived lives and the potential for reflexivity and transformation within autoethnographic texts
Social Theory for Coaches: A Foucauldian Reading of One Athlete's Poor Performance
This paper explores my “sense making” when a male cross-country runner was coaching performed below expectation. My initial understanding of his poor performance was to blame him for “lacking” the appropriate mental toughness. As a result, I located the “problem” within him and subsequently ignored many of my own taken-for-granted coaching practices as perhaps contributing to his poor performance. In this paper, provide an alternative reading of …
“Messy Texts”, or the Unexplainable Performance: Reading Bodies' Evidence
Following global efforts to impose an orthodoxy on knowledge generation that is above all, evidence-based, a number of social science scholars have begun to question the very ground on which evidence has been given its cultural and canonical purchase (e.g., Denzin & Giardina, 2008). For coach educators, this debate raises a number of relevant questions. For example, how should evidence be represented when researching coaches' effectiveness? Or, h…
Planning, practice and performance: The discursive formation of coaches' knowledge
This paper takes as its starting point that coaches' efforts at planning their athletes' training are a complex practice involving so many variables that the logic of how they all ‘fit together’ to produce a peak performance is never obvious or clear. However, many coaches operate as if their athletes' training programmes can be assembled in a coherent, rational manner, or as if ‘systems’ exist to make planning an orderly sequence of steps or sta…
Toward New Conversations Between Sociology and Psychology
Social theory and narrative research: A point of view
In this short essay, I explore in a narrative style the following question: do narrative analyses of sport and exercise need to engage more fully with social theory in order to become more forceful in their arguments? More specifically, to have real impact, and to achieve what we are especially trained to do as qualitative social scientists, should our research narratives examine more explicitly—less showing and more telling—the complex relations…
Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’
Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes' unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given th…
Challenge and relief: A Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of retirement from professional association football in the United Kingdom
The aim of this study was to consider the retirement experiences of British male professional association footballers by utilising Foucault's analysis of discipline discussed in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Specifically, we drew upon Foucault to consider how, through the various techniques and instruments of discipline, the professional football context produces 'docile footballing bodies' and how this might influence a player'…
How power moves: A Foucauldian analysis of (in)effective coaching
Knowing how to coach effectively is one ever-present truth across all sports and yet our previous research based on the work of Michel Foucault has illustrated how the effectiveness of endurance running coaches' everyday coaching practices is limited by their use of various disciplinary techniques. Missing from these analyses was any consideration of Foucault's conceptualization of how modern power works through the disciplinary instruments or th…
Jogging not running: A narrative approach to exploring ‘exercise as leisure’ after a life in elite football
As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their post-sport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approa…
Beat the Game: A Foucauldian exploration of coaching differently in an elite rugby academy
Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of game-centred approaches in coaching contexts, this study explored the impact of a unique problem-based learn…
Breaking Coaching's Rules: Transforming the Body, Sport, and Performance
Who knew that doing the wrong things could make everything so right?' There can be little doubt that sports' dominant bioscientific articulation of the athletic body exerts a strong influence on coaches. Yet, on closer examination, this articulation and the practices it produces are not as straightforward as most coaches and scholars assume. Within the sociocultural study of coaching, scholars have drawn on Michel Foucault's disciplinary framewor…
After the Dust Settles: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes' "Re-orientation" to Exercise
One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance …
Broad Shoulders
This brief narrative represents a tribute to Norman Denzin’s leadership
Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (11 works) · Sport Psychology and Performance (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Athletes (8 works)