School of Public Health

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1633

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Cultural Studies

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    America's Sweethearts? A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team
    (2022) Nowosatka, Lauren Riley; Jette, Shannon L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The “often imitated, never equaled” Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCCs) are self-proclaimed as “the premier cheerleading squad in the world,” universally setting the stage (field) for professional cheerleading. In 2006, “America’s Sweethearts” launched a hit reality television (TV) show, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team (DCCs: MTT), where the squad director positions the organization as empowering women in the opening the series’ 13th season. Taking this seemingly contradictory statement—made during the #MeToo moment of 2018—as a department point, this thesis examines the constructions of femininity and empowerment on offer in season 13 of DCCs: MTT. A textual analysis adopted from Johnson et al.’s (2004) reading for dominance methodology, with a theoretical foundation in feminist discourse analysis and intersectionality, was used to examine season 13 of DCCs: MTT, answering the following questions: 1. What versions of femininity are on offer to viewers of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team? How do they intersect with race, sexuality, class, ability, etc.? 2. How is empowerment constructed through Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team? Findings suggest that performances of femininity are aligned with emphasized femininity and ambassadorship, offering a homogenous image to viewers that idealizes and reinforces hegemonic beauty standards, the thin-ideal, and the objectification of women, paired with displays of emotional expressions, “intelligence,” and poise that subjectively position the cheerleaders within the larger patriarchal, late-capitalist Dallas Cowboys and NFL structures. Supposedly empowering to the cheerleaders, the discursive practices, enforced performativities, and productional strategies displayed on season 13 of DCCs: MTT, frames the institution as faux-empowering, endorsing empowerment as the product of making “correct” individual choices. Consequently, cheerleaders and viewers who do not make these decisions are rendered disempowered and made to feel shameful, contradicting the spirited nature of the sport. This thesis seeks to fill the gap created by the lack of critical, sociological discussions of professional cheerleading as a spectacle of late-capitalist, uber sport, permeated through popular culture and which analyzes professional cheerleading through the site of reality TV.
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    FITTING IN: (RADICALLY) CONTEXTUALIZING THE CROSSFIT PHENOMENON
    (2018) Edmonds, Shaun E; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    CrossFit is a global fitness and cultural phenomenon whose ascendance over the past two decades has made it a dominant physical cultural practice, and a powerful influence within contemporary society. Through a multi-site and multi-method contextualization of CrossFit, this dissertation aims to critically explicate the power and power relations operating in, and through, the institutional, discursive, subcultural, and experiential dimensions of the CrossFit assemblage. This dissertation is presented through a collection of four academic journal articles prepared for publication in specific refereed journals. Chapter 1 uses the theory/method of articulation to radically contextualize CrossFit in, and through, the contemporary moment. Chapter 2 performs a critical discourse analysis on three key themes within CrossFit to explore how, and in what ways, biopower is operationalized and CrossFit subjectivities are created in and through CrossFit’s intertextual assemblage. Chapter 3 uses spatial analysis, participant interviews, and narrative vignettes to elucidate the ways in which a nostalgic reimagining of place influences the development of community, lifestyle, and personal health within a CrossFit Box. Chapter 4 provides a Deleuzian autoethnographic narrative that explores the process by which I move from insider to outsider status within CrossFit, and how that experience is co-constituted with other members of the CrossFit Box. While each chapter takes different theoretical, methodological, and empirical emphases, by taking a holistic approach to the CrossFit phenomenon this dissertation develops a nuanced and grounded explication of the CrossFit brand, and its entanglement with broader political, social, cultural, and economic forces and relations which constitute the contemporary moment.
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    'Right to the Active City': Public Recreation and Urban Governance in Baltimore
    (2014) Bustad, Jacob; Andrews, David; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Since the inception of the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks (BCRP) in 1940, public recreation in Baltimore has continued to be restructured in relation to changing modes of urban governance, in particular in regards to the city's network of recreation centers. More recently, the reorganization of recreation resulted in the 2011 Mayor's Recreation Center Task Force plan, which proposed the further reformation of the department and changes to the provision and distribution of recreation centers and recreational services. This dissertation - entitled Right to the Active City: Public Recreation and Urban Governance in Baltimore - draws from a diverse and reflexive theoretical and methodological approach in exploring the historical and contemporary forms, practices and experiences of public recreation in Baltimore, specifically focusing on the city's recreation centers as social and spatial manifestations of the processes of urban governance. In seeking to engage and analyze the individuals, institutions, spaces and practices of urban public recreation, the primary goals of this research are: 1) to examine the intersection of historical and current formations of recreation policy and broader processes of urban governance, including the implications of these changing arrangements for the localized experiences of public recreation; 2) to analyze the spaces of public recreation, in particular the changing forms and practices of planning and design that is embedded within a shift between different `recreation center' models; 3) to draw out and describe the often complex and contradictory inter-relationships between the City government, BCRP, community and non-profit groups and city residents, focusing on the associations that actively construct and constitute an emergent form of public recreation; and 4) to provide a nuanced research approach that both contributes to relevant scholarly fields, including public health, kinesiology, sociology, urban studies and physical cultural studies, and simultaneously seeks to promote the co-production of research that can be engaged by and with those involved in the processes of public recreation. In short, this research attempts to better grasp the lived experiences of the active urban body and urban physical cultures, through an analysis of the planning and provision of recreational sites, services and opportunities in a specific postindustrial metropolis.
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    Cycling the City: Locating Cycling in the Continued (Re)Structuring of North American Cities
    (2014) Rick, Oliver James Collard; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Bicycling is a growing mobility practice within contemporary U.S. cities that has multiple effects on the formation of the urban as “We are surrounded by cycling” (Horton et al, 2007, p. 1). This project investigates how cycling has shaped the city by analyzing the role that the governance and practice of cycling currently plays in the political, economic, social, spatial, and affective re-formation of the urban. Through the use of a combination of methods, working at various levels of analysis, the aim is to locate the impact of cycling policies and practices on the structural, discursive, and embodied dimensions of contemporary urban (re)structuring. It is an analysis of macro political processes, the formation of cycling communities, and the experiential dimension of riding in the city. Latham & McCormack (2010) state “cities are constantly generating new forms of collective life, novel ways of being together” (p.55). Thus, this project interrogates the various ways in which cycling impacts upon cities, and influences their (re)formation in potentially “historically unprecedented ways” (Wachsmuth et al, 2011, p. 741). Through studying cycling in Boston, Baltimore, and Washington DC this project provides a multi-sited analysis of how cycling is positioned within U.S. cities currently, as well as the complex and diverse processes that inform the contemporary organization of these urban spaces. U.S. cities currently exist within a broad “climate of cuts, austerity and state retrenchment” (Newman, 2013, p. 1) that has defined current patterns of urban governance. I have researched the ways in which cycling has underpinned and simultaneously challenged these broad shifts toward neoliberal governance. Cycling is both drawn into “marketing of urban “culture” and history by entrepreneurial governance” (Cherot and Murray, 2002, p. 432), but also underpins cities as entities that “defy efforts to be classified into types, reduced to essential characteristics, and fixed by boundaries (intellectual or otherwise)” (Prytherch, 2002, p. 772). As such this project investigates this simultaneously overlapping and contradictory impact of cycling on the city, mapping the multiple locations of cycling within the perpetual (re)formation of the urban.
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    Postcolonial Play: Encounters with Sport and Physical Culture in Contemporary India
    (2012) Maddox, Callie Elizabeth; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Drawing upon the idea that India and the West are "tethered geographies" (Reddy, 2006), this dissertation project explores how the ongoing and dialogic relationship between contemporary India and the West is represented, experienced, and contested in and through the realms of sport and physical culture. With escalating rates of economic growth, a rapidly expanding middle class, and increasing international political clout, India is emerging as a global power while simultaneously defining itself as a postcolonial nation against, and in tandem with, the West. Utilizing a fluid theoretical vocabulary (Andrews, 2008) and employing mixed qualitative research methods that include participant observation and interviews, I examine how various sites of physical culture serve as points of meaningful exchange between India and the West. This project presents a necessarily partial and contingent understanding of the chosen sites, tempered by considerable reflexivity and self-awareness, as my own Self is intricately enmeshed in this work. The four distinct, yet related, empirical studies that comprise this project thus focus on the following: 1) the embodiment of gendered nationalism and male power as manifested by the Cheer Queens, a cheerleading squad supporting the Pune Warriors cricket team in the Indian Premier League, and the Great Khali, a professional wrestler from India who performs internationally for World Wrestling Entertainment; 2) the city of Delhi's efforts to (re)create itself as a "world class" metropolis by hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games that resulted in spatial exclusion and the magnification of social inequalities; 3) changing body ideals amongst the young Indian middle class influenced by Western fitness practices and neoliberal discourses of healthism; 4) perceptions of authenticity held by Western tourists traveling to India to study Ashtanga yoga that reject the syncretic evolution of yoga and contribute to a construction of Otherness that continues to mark India and Indians as exotic, primitive, and poor. Also included is an "interlude" chapter centered on my personal experiences as a white, Western woman navigating the complexities of daily life in India and questioning the place of my own body within a context of fear, harassment, and assault.