School of Public Health

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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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    A CASE STUDY OF RED BULL’S USE OF SPORTING EVENTS IN THE NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIORNMENT
    (2024) Weber, Emilio; Andrews, David L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project critically examines the ways in which city space and place are mobilized for capital interests through an examination of the global sports and energy drinks brand, Red Bull, and specifically its urban-based event strategies. The events such as the ones Red Bull hosts, alongside other spectacular urban projects have been prominent endeavors in which the lived experience of space has been reformulated by those who wield power and influence in the city. Informed by the contextual forces and logics of neoliberal urbanism, Red Bull strategically deploys the physical and symbolic reformulation of cities as an important aspect of its brand marketing strategy. The company, alongside local entities, impact the physical environment of the urban areas they occupy for the events. In addition, representations of places are presented and altered. These alterations of urban space and place have included an increased focus on spectacular consumption sites and experiences, in addition to the policing and surveillance of such spaces. Furthermore, this thesis offers analytical insight into the ways Red Bull’s urban strategizing is both and product and producer of the normalized neoliberal fabric that has come to envelope the contemporary US city: ultimately reproducing urban spaces which promote private profit and continue or exacerbate the inequalities felt in cities. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary scholarship, I examine the relationship between, and impact of, sporting events hosted within the context of neoliberal cities. Deploying theoretical frameworks based in urban studies, neoliberalism, and critical geography informs the literature review and my research. This literature includes, but is not restricted to, physical cultural studies, urban studies, the sociology of sport, and event literature. Additionally, I utilize a case study method to examine the nature of the events within the urban and sport context they take place in. Completing field research and participant observation at three Red Bull sporting events, hosted in three distinct locales in June 2023, August 2023, and February 2024, I focus on the composition, meaning, affect, and experience of urban space, as created by the event itself, alongside marketing and promotional strategies of the company and cities in relation to these events. The research findings are divided into two empirical chapters, focused on the material and symbolic impacts upon urban space and place, respectively. I posit these findings as a normalized occupation of urban space, following the logics of neoliberalism and the event/content production of Red Bull. In conforming to neoliberal capitalist ideas focused on commercialized spectacle, these events simultaneously work to normalize this corporate use of urban space.
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    #Shebelieves, But Does She? Examining The Impact Of The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s Empowerment Campaign On The White Woman Millennial
    (2017) Brice, Julie Elizabeth; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In 2015, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) launched the #SheBelieves campaign encouraging young women to continue believing in their goals and dreams (“WNT Launches #SheBelieves Initiative,” n.d.). #SheBelieves is thus an examplar of a promotional discourse which utilizes ideas of female empowerment in a manner that contributes to the constitution of the postfeminine, neoliberal, millennial subject identified by numerous scholars (Genz, 2009; McRobbie, 2009; Rottenberg, 2014). However, much of this scholarship ignores the fluid, and oftentimes contradictory, nature of subjectivity, and fails to acknowledge complexity of the 21st century woman’s lived experiences (Blackman, 2008; Weedon, 2004). Therefore, this thesis uses semi-structured small group interviews to answer to what extent, and in what ways have young white women experienced, and been interpellated by, the empowerment rhetoric and idealized postfeminine-neoliberal, millennial subjectivity, embedded within U.S. National Women’s Soccer #SheBelieves campaign? The results are mixed: women did exhibit elements of postfeminist and neoliberal sensibilities with regards to their personal engagement with U.S. Women’s National Soccer; yet, the women also showed significant resistance, and thereby considerable agency, to aspects of the #SheBelieves discourse.
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    Fitness Philanthropy, Failed States, and Physical Cultural Fissures: The Problem of Addressing "Urban" Youth in Baltimore
    (2014) Mower, Ronald Lee; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Situated within a severely polarized Baltimore City, this dissertation explores the increasing role of voluntary organizations in addressing health disparities and various "crises" commonly associated with the "urban" environment (juvenile delinquency, crime, poverty, and ill-health). Given renowned cultural geographer, David Harvey's (2001) proclamation that Baltimore is a city "emblematic of the processes that have moulded cities under US capitalism" (p. 7), the rise of privatized voluntarism reflects a distinct shifting of responsibility inherent to neoliberalization processes. The failures of the state in providing adequate public resources for physical activity and health for example, has resulted in more private citizens deploying their educational and professional expertise, wealth and spare time, and creative ambitions to intervene in ways they deem most appropriate. Amidst an effort to map the broad structures of racial and class inequality shaping Baltimore's divisive environments, the specific focus of this project entailed a close ethnographic engagement with one non-profit organization that sought to reform the health and fitness lifestyles of "at-risk" and underserved African American youth between 2008 and 2012. As a participant observer, I examined the everyday operation of fitness pedagogies, disciplinary structures, and power relations between wealthy, white philanthropists and middle class fitness professionals ("faculty"), and the underserved working class black youth ("students") they attempted to instruct about fitness and health. Employing what Wolcott (2008) defined as the ethnographic methods of experiencing and inquiring, I observed and spoke with people concerning their perceptions of fitness and health, and their experiences within the program. I also examined programmatic documents from several fitness-based non-profit organizations across Baltimore. Issues of white privilege, philanthropic intent, colormuteness, and the normalization of neoliberal healthism emerged as key findings. As an embodied participant, I also encountered scenarios that challenged my habitual ability to cross the racial and class boundaries typified by the positionalities and lived experience of faculty and students. Having been reared in, and routinely experienced, such divisions in my own life, the performative politics of embodiment became an important point of analysis to make sense of my cultural "betweenness" (England, 1994), and the role that self-reflexive writing practices played during fieldwork.