Category: women and sport

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Women, Academia, Sport: On Academia, Yoga, and the Practice of Beginning Again

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“If you fall out, you are human. If you fall out and get back in, you are a yogi.”
It’s 10am. The studio is unusually hot today—high humidity, the windows are already streaming. The noise of the world outside seems distant in the faux tropics of the heated room. I have a full day of revisions ahead of me, but as I unfurl my mat, all I need to be is Kate, radically myself in this moment, a moving, breathing participant in the now. I usually practice yoga in the evenings, when I feel more awake and more myself, but lately I have been caught up in a continual whirlwind of revisions—for articles and for my dissertation—that has thrown me out of whack mentally and has sent my anxiety levels soaring. So, I decide to switch it up a bit and see what happens when I make the conscious decision to begin my day with centering and presence.
Yoga—while certainly not a cure-all remedy, has some concrete applications beyond the mat. It is first and foremost a practice, one that teaches you presence, as well as the honour and dignity of beginning again. If you have ever practiced yoga, you know all too well the lingering frustration when on Tuesday you were able to fully kick back into standing bow, but today you can’t even find your balance in tree. But you try, and try again, stretching your muscles and fascia to their present ability, making room for the new, flushing out the old. In experimenting with the now of your body, yoga offers you a chance to laugh at yourself, to enjoy the foibles of the human body as it moves, sometimes clumsily, sometimes gracefully. In this way, it is a nice counterbalance to the “perfect mind” syndrome that plagues academia. When you play with balance and respect your body’s capabilities in the moment, falling out and beginning again restores dignity and lightness to the body and mind, and encourages you to be empathetic with yourself in the process.
As academics, and, more generally, as people in the saturated milieu in which we live, yoga is an available antidote to the constant demands for active production and perfection. While dropping the day’s worries and focusing on the breath seems like a luxury, for me, it has become a basic human need. With so much pressure to “get things right” in my professional life, yoga has taught me invaluable lessons of balance and process. It is a space and time where you can fall out and get back in—under the intensity of heat, the sweat and breath of neighbouring bodies, the closeness of the experience can be overwhelming. There is also something intensely human to be felt, however, in the pure pleasure of movement and breath.
Yoga is consciousness in motion. It is about synching the flows of the body with the natural rhythms of the breath, the life force, prana. As a doctorate student who studies the projective poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and the Black Mountain crowd, this aspect of uniting the breath and body in movement is especially poignant. The projective poetic mode advocates for the immediate connection between lines of verse and the breath and movement of the body through space.
According to Olson, proprioception, “sensibility within the organism / by movement of its own tissues,” extends beyond aesthetics to become a poethic, a practice of living and creating rooted in the immediacy of the body in motion. “Proprioception” comes from the Latin proprius meaning “one’s own,” or what is proper to the self; in this way, it identifies a radically personal and subjective means of relating to the world through the body. At its core, it is about bodily awareness: of being aware of the parts of the moving body as they are extended in space, in relation with other objects in this spatial field. It is a term that certainly applies to yoga, but also to academia.
The act of publishing and sharing ideas, of receiving critique and revising accordingly, are all practices of awareness—not of the body, per se, but of ideas, which are always extensions of the body and markers of its growth. When we send out ideas for review, we are experimenting with our ideas in space—identifying their extensions and limitations, but most importantly, realizing their capacity for growth and change. This both humbles and opens the self as much as falling out of Eagle pose and getting right back in, with a new awareness of where you are at in the present.
Yoga is about experimentation. There are many parallels to draw between repeating asanas, experimenting with movement not for the pursuit of perfection but for progress, and academic revision, the reorienting and shifting of ideas to adapt to newly discovered contexts and ideas. I think we sometimes forget that academia, like yoga, is a practice. When we revise our ideas, when we consider other viewpoints and angles and incorporate them in our own work, we are being present and mindful. We are also confirming the humanity of the work, the organic community of people coming together in pursuit of knowledge not as dogma but as practice.
Because what is academia, the pursuit of knowledge, if not the art of beginning again?
So, as I roll out my mat in this balmy room, I don’t know what the next hour and a half holds for me and my practice. I also don’t know what the result of my hundred visions and revisions beyond the mat will amount to. All I know is that I can be present and patient with what emerges; if I lose grasp of my breath, I can get it back again.

If you make mistakes, you are an academic. If you revise and resubmit, you are human.

Kate Siklosi lives in Toronto and is a PhD Candidate in English at York University. Her research interests centre upon the intersections of Canadian and American avant-garde poetry and poetics, post-structuralism, and spatial theory. She is currently co-editor of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought.
academic work · guest post · kinaesthetic thinking · play · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: Finding My Light Switch in the Dark

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When the first post of this series popped up on my Facebook feed, I thought: “now THIS is something I can get behind.” Full disclosure: I spend a fair bit of my non-work time moving—biking, running, or walking to and from work; playing recreational hockey (emphasis on the recreational, but for a fabulous team named the Booby Orrs—or the boobs for short); honing my basement soccer, wrestling, and pull-up skills with two very special 9 and 6 year-old friends; skiing when there is enough snow to do so, which there hasn’t been of late; coaching rugby for a fierce and talented group of young twenty-somethings; walking with my 8-lb sporty-diva dog who is a better hiker than I am; and of course, lots and lots of stretching (apparently I am pretty stiff—go figure).

Note sporty-diva dog in backpack!

Most days I choose movement over social activity, not because I don’t adore my friends, or crave human connection, but because most socializing involves sitting still. When planning a trip, I often consider what opportunities for movement there will be, even before checking into local options for food or coffee. When traveling to a new city, I routinely opt for a bike rental over a car. And so on and so forth. I am somewhat maniacal when it comes to moving and movement, and until my early 30s I hadn’t really stopped to consider why (probably because I hadn’t really ever stopped).

Part of me never questioned my need for movement because I was a sporty kid. When I was first on skates, I sprinted (toe picks in ice and off I went). My summer camps were always sports camps. Gym and recess were my favourite ‘subjects’ in school (yes, I was that kid). And by about the age of 10, I was barred from playing driveway basketball with my older (less kinesthetically-minded) brother because I made him look bad. As a then tomboy and now butch identified person, my sportiness has been one of the ways I make sense (to myself and to others) in the world. I understand now that statements like “she’s sporty” stood in for “I know she’s not a normal little girl” (whatever that might be). I also recognize that my “rambunctiousness” and “excessive energy” served simultaneously to excuse and negate as well as to honour and acknowledge my masculinity—and in some contexts it still does.

I began my university path in sport studies because I assumed that’s where maniacal movement people like me went (and to a large degree they do). As an undergraduate student in sport studies, I learned that our kinesthetic sense is that which enables us to find the light switch in the dark. From the Greek word kin, meaning to move or set in motion, our kinesthetic awareness is the sensation of moving in space. In a physical and philosophical sense, it is the way in which our bodies come to know. While I eventually migrated from sport to health studies, I took the lessons of movement (and the analogy of the light switch in the dark) with me.

The summer after my first year in undergrad, my father died. It was also the same summer I took up outdoor running. Until this point, my running had only involved chasing a ball, avoiding a defender, circling a track, or, as previously explained, on skates. At 20, I had neither the emotional wherewithal or environment to talk through the impact of that tragedy, but running helped me come to terms with his loss in my own way. I ran carrying confusion, anger, guilt and sadness, and in learning to jog, I also learned to take these emotions in and let them go, one winded breath at a time.

Fast forward about a decade and I find myself struggling (as many do) in the often exceedingly slow, generally physically still moments of dissertation writing. In an opposite way of what Hannah writes—that some parts of academia gave her body back to her—I’m convinced that my body in movement gave me academia. Not only did I enter the academy through movement studies (the thing I knew and loved most), but my compulsion to move provided me the advice I needed to get through—and sit through—the stillest parts of my PhD. In 2007 I tried my first Bikram yoga class. Warranted critiques of Bikram yoga aside, for the next two and a half years as a chipped away at my dissertation I was reminded to sit through discomfort, without trying to relieve it. This lesson has continuing resonance in my intellectual labours.

With the finish line of my defense in sight, I received the news that my supervisor’s cancer had metastasized. I received this news away from home in Prince Edward County, with a rented bike in hand, a small (sporty-diva) dog in tow, and a local trail map. Unsure of what to do, I pushed, peddled, and rode in 25 degree heat. 50 kilometers later, reconnected with my beating heart, the news had sunk in.

As I approach 40, I still find movement one of the most reliable forms of care I have available to me. It has been one of the most stable and consistent presences in my life. I move because, quite literally, it keeps me together. And while I feel things deeply, I don’t always need to (or want to) talk them through—it’s just not how my body has learned to be in space. Instead, I move through space, and continue to fumble (as many do) for my light switch in moments of darkness.

That, and I continue to stretch.
Alissa Overend is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. Her research and teaching are in the sociology of health and illness; food studies; contemporary social theory; intersectional feminism; media and discourse analysis. She and her sporty-diva dog are often out on adventures.
guest post · self care · theory and praxis · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: Lake Theory and Sweaty Praxis

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In the summer of 2012 my friend L and I packed up our laptops and our books and her dog and a four-week supply of nutritional yeast and headed to the lake to write our dissertations.
L’s family owns a cabin in the country north of Belleville, “lakeland rockland and hill country.” You travel to it by driving north a ways, and then getting into an old motor boat, riding low in the water with the weight of your food and your books and your dog, and navigating some depths and some shallows until you arrive at the cantilevered dock (a new dock, still a topic of conversation around the lake) and walk your things up the hill to the cabin bag by bag. You have to bring your water in, too, because the lake water’s no good for drinking, though it’s fine for dishes if you boil it first. The cabin has electricity to charge the laptops, enough cell reception for emergencies if you stand at the end of the dock and hold your phone over your head, a hot plate and a barbeque and endless spells of perfect silence. It has everything you need to write a dissertation.
This is how our days went: whenever the sun woke us up, we’d head downhill to the lake in a towel for the first swim of the day. Swimsuits weren’t really necessary on weekdays, when the lake was ours. Once we were both up, we’d put on shorts and sports bras, plug an iPod into a mini battery-powered speaker we could bring down to the dock, set up our yoga mats, and prepare for our morning two-person gym class. We took turns leading warm ups, core, legs, arms, pushing each other harder, laughing at the absurdity of our lunges and high kicks on a long dock jutting serenely into the smooth lake, sometimes waving at bewildered boaters or ignoring the questions of curious swimmers. When the workout was over and we’d cooled down with another plunge into the lake, the writing day would begin, on the dock if the weather was fine, in the cabin if it was too blustery.
I have never written so happily in my life, there in the woods, when I cured writer’s block not by checking my email but by jumping in the lake for a few minutes, feeling the water on my skin, swimming out far enough that I could float on my back and not see the shore. There, in the woods, in the lake, the solitariness of writing felt not isolating but exactly right.
It’s harder, these days, to get to the lake. For one thing, I live in Alberta now, where lakes are few and far between. For another thing, I’m a half country away from L and R, the women with whom I joyfully sweated my way through my PhD. I’m a full-time instructor now, and the days are longer and less my own, and sometimes it feels like doing my job well means doing everything else poorly, my relationships as much as my self-care, however loaded and compromised and commodified a term that is.  
This is a common refrain: how academia takes us away from our bodies, takes us out of our bodies.
But, as hard as this particular moment is, I stand behind the claim that academia—that some parts of academia—gave my body back to me.
I have been more or less fat my entire life, and like many high-achieving fat girls, threw myself into schoolwork out of an awareness that this was a venue in which my aberrant, undisciplined body would be, if not accepted, then tacitly ignored. And ignore it I did, through my undergrad and masters, with the exception of a few depressing diets and the occasional stint at solitary, disciplinary gym-going. But the deep dive into academic living that was the PhD brought me two discoveries.
First, fat theory, via feminist and queer theory, gave me the conceptual tools to reclaim the pleasures of my fat body. Theory became a foundation upon which I could build both my joy and my furious resistance, something that could ground me back into myself as a body, writing. Second, the isolation and monotony of the dissertation pushed me to build a community of women with whom to enact that pleasure, to make that theory into a sweaty praxis.

I miss the lake. I miss the community I left behind. But I get to carry with me the body those years gave back to me. It’s not always going to be a strong or fit body, it’s not always going to be a “well” body, but it will always be my body, so long as I can feel the lake water on my skin.
 
Hannah McGregor  makes a Harry Potter podcast called Witch, Please, sings in an all women’s barbershop chorus, and has a cat named Al Purrdy. In her spare time, she’s an instructor in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and director of Modern Magazines Project Canada. Her research focuses on Canadian literature and culture with an emphasis on middlebrow literary production, periodical studies, and digital humanities. 
guest post · self care · shifting perspectives · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: Why I Do This

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It’s 4 am, and I have been lying on a cot in the aid station for the last 90 minutes.

A thick wool blanket is pulled over my head for warmth, my right hand clutches a slice from a still-fresh French baguette, and my left holds a water bottle filled with what I can only describe as stomach-turningly sweet liquid.

I am 22 hours into this ultramarathon through Alps (53.5 miles, I remind myself for encouragement), and I calculate that the remaining 21 miles are likely to take me around 9 hours.
I don’t think that I have it in me.

Ultramarathons (or “ultras,” as we call them) are not for the faint of heart. Defined as any footrace longer than a marathon (which is 26.2 miles), ultras are everywhere these days—on roads, on trails, in the desert, and, in my case, through the mountains.
My race is part of a weeklong festival of races around Mont Blanc, all of which end in iconic Chamonix. Mine, called the Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie (or TDS for short), starts in Courmayeur, Italy, traveling through the statuesque French Alps to finish at the foot of Mont Blanc. A 75-mile race, TDS also boasts 7300 meters of climbing (and 7300 meters of descending) over technical terrain, which have slowed me to a near crawl.

 

When I tell my work friends about the race, one of the most common replies is “75 miles?! I don’t even drive that far!” Quickly followed by, “why in the world would you want to do this?”
I usually chuckle. And then I start explaining about how I love the mountains and how I love that feeling of being part of them. I love the feeling of strength I get from the training, like I can tackle anything that comes before me. I love the silence in my mind and the space from my worries. I love the metronome of my late afternoon runs—slipping away from my perch on the 20th floor of the SickKids research tower and from my pursuit to decipher the intricate workings of the cell; sliding through the rush-hour crowds as I make my way north on Bay; cresting the final hill in the Brickworks to look back to downtown Toronto, alight with the setting sun. I love coming back to my lab on the dark, now-quiet streets, and how my thoughts, effervescent, now skip and dance beside me.
I love the humility races like this demand. I love the challenge. And I love that I have to prove myself each time, that nothing is guaranteed.
What I don’t tell my friends is that, however hard they think ultras are, it doesn’t come close to the reality. The drip, drip, drip of your thoughts betraying you. Your legs begging you to stop. The hours and miles stretching before you, seemingly endless. Each race, each time you push the body for this long, is a new struggle with your mind. Ultras can strip away all of those superficial reasons for running, penetrating to the very core of your being. With every mile,—and, later, with every tenth of a mile,—races like TDS demand the real answer to the question of why.
At some point, if you’re going to finish, you need to speak to the demons.
But, as I lie in my cot, if I’m entirely honest with myself, even with three years of ultra-running experience, even though I’ve finished TDS before, this is the very question I’m asking myself. Why should I keep going? The excuses start running again. It’s going to be hours until I finish. I’ve already done over 50 miles. I’m tired. My blister hurts. I’ve been nauseous for the entire night. I want to brush my teeth! I want my pyjamas! I would stamp my foot in frustration if I could. I have so far to go. So many more hours of pain. This is hard. I don’t want to.
That’s it, though, that’s the rub. I don’t want to, but I know that I can.
There are no fireworks in this thought, no epic narratives. It’s just the simple knowledge that I can still put one foot in front of the other. That there is still enough time to finish.
How can I meet the eyes of my husband, my mom, my friends if I stop when I could have kept going? How can I repay all of their support—their emails and texts and far-flung love—by just failing to get out of a warm cot? After all, isn’t running 75 miles in the Alps supposed to be hard? Isn’t that the point?
A half-hour has passed. Still foggy, I sit up and gingerly put on my pack. I stand. My legs ache.
“Better?” the nurse asks.
“A bit,” I reply. I try to smile. “Enough.”
“Bravo, Olivia. Courage.”
I walk out the tent. The mountains behind me are silent, and their dark silhouettes mysterious against the star-filled sky.
Turning on my headlamp, I walk into the night.

Olivia S. Rissland is a Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute and Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Her lab works on understanding how cells decode their genomes. A recent transplant to Canada, she enjoys exploring the ravines in Toronto and taking photos of her cat.
academic reorganization · guest post · kinaesthetic thinking · play · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: A place in the league

erinewunker
Maybe My Derby Name Will Be Attack-Anemic

 

 

 
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m in a gym in Spryfield, Nova Scotia. I have just skated 20 laps in 5 minutes–my best time yet. We have reached the halfway point of the Anchor City Rollers’ Fresh Meat program, and one of our coaches is explaining how the league works: “We want you to know that no matter what your skill level is, there will always be a place for you to skate in our league.” This practice has been rough on me, but her statement affirms that I have chosen the right sport. I have avoided sports for years: I’m not competitive, I’m quite clumsy, and I associate sports with the burning shame of being the worst in the group. So far, roller derby is different. It’s terrifically welcoming and supportive. We are learning so many new skills–stopping, whips, transitions, crossovers, and endurance–all while trying to get comfortable on our skates. But the coaches are good-humoured and attentive in a way that makes it all seem achievable. When I start to feel like I’m falling behind, they roll up, ready to offer me guidance and help me recognize how much I am progressing.
 
Like Erin, I’m a walker. Mostly, I walk to campus and back–a solid walk through parks and a swanky neighbourhood. For me, walking is a time of mental processing. I usually don’t listen to the radio or music, because the sound crowds out my thoughts. Walking helps me sort my thoughts, ideas, and feelings. On days when I stay home, my brain feels cluttered with unsorted material.
 
But walking isn’t enough. I need something more active and engrossing, something to take me out of my head and into my body. I think this has always been an issue with sports; if I don’t enjoy the activity, I don’t commit to it mentally and physically. My discomfort erodes my attention, so I make mistakes that make me even more uncomfortable, and eventually I quit. I approached roller derby with the assumption that I would love it. I was so relieved to find that I did. It’s exciting enough to engage all my mental energy. It’s two hours a week when I don’t think about my research, my coursework, marking, or writing. It leaves me feeling exhausted but powerful. It’s a discipline totally removed from my other wonderful but totally fraught discipline–literary studies. I want to devote more of my time and energy to this feeling. I do squats while I wash dishes. I work on my balance while my students write a quiz. I do strength training throughout the week, because I like the idea of arriving to every practice just a little bit stronger.
 
And through it all, I feel a sense of security–there will always be a place for me in this league. Even if I’m the worst in the league, I still get to be in the league. I should note that I don’t work well under pressure. I never complete my work last minute. I am rigorous in my time management because otherwise I end up on the kitchen floor crying. For me, roller derby feels like a sport without all the pressure. I can progress at my own rate. I can set my own goals. I can participate as much as my schedule will allow. I can attend meetings and events, watch bouts, trade fitness tips with other rollers in our Facebook groups. So far, it’s the kind of space I wish academia could be. It’s the kind of space I try to build with my colleagues, the kind of space I see my mentors trying to make for me, and the kind of community that helps us endure in these broken institutions.
 
In a PhD program, no one–not even the most supportive colleagues and mentors–can assure you that there will always be a place for you. I receive two kinds of advice, usually simultaneously: do everything you can to be an ideal job candidate, and have one foot out the door. I don’t have to tell any of you how daunting that is. You’re here, making the choice every day to do more, work harder, try again, and/or you’re making the difficult, exciting choice to make a career elsewhere. I don’t know yet what my own path will be, but I’m starting to see the value in finding and building spaces for myself outside of academia. The mental space of walking, the physical space of roller derby, the community space of the league–hopefully, when the going gets tough I have these to fall back on.
 













Kaarina Mikalson  is a PhD student in English at Dalhousie University, and the project manager for Canada and the Spanish Civil War. Her research interests include literature of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the intersection of gender and labour in Canadian literature. Besides roller derby, she enjoys sewing, comics, and lipstick. 

academic reorganization · kinaesthetic thinking · self care · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: I Dance Therefore I Am

erinewunker
The famed ballet choreographer George Balanchine once said, “I don’t want dancers who want to dance. I want dancers who have to dance.”
I have to dance. I do not think I could manage school, or much of anything else in fact, without dance. Unlike Erin, who calls herself a kinaesthetic thinker, I dance to get away from my thoughts and out of my head. Dance is the only thing I have ever found – except perhaps film – that allows me this reprieve. And as someone who struggles with anxiety, depression, and perfectionism, it is both a welcome and necessary reprieve.

I said I would dance anywhere. That includes near Parliament Hill!

When I talk about dance, unless I am referring specifically to my time inside a studio rehearsing a piece or working on my technique, I am usually speaking about improvisation. Though I enjoy these other aspects of dance, and recognize they are necessary to expanding my control over my body, and consequently, my ability to express myself as limitlessly as possible, I find the most solace in improvisation. Give me a dark room and some music, and my body takes care of the rest.

I will dance just about anywhere – from airports to parking lots, to between bookshelves in the library, in my room, and, of course, at dance studios. When I begin to panic and feel like my world is spiralling out of control, getting up and starting to move, with or without music, in any space, grounds me in my body. As someone whose mind is usually either stuck ruminating on the past, or else is speeding off into the future, dance draws me back into the present. I have been filled by some of the purest joy while dancing, but have also turned to dance when I am too numb to feel anything else. I often process my emotions, or at least allow myself room to feel them, through dance.
Ironically, I have both school and my perfectionism to thank for my years of training. Upon realizing that dance classes were perhaps the only things that would keep me from studying, over time, my parents gradually gave in to more classes, more workshops, and more competitions – anything to get me away from my textbooks. It was even thanks to my grade eight math teacher that I ended up at my high school where I studied dance. My parents were anxious to get his advice during a parent-teacher interview on where I might thrive most after middle school. As the story goes, he ignored their questions about IB and gifted programs, and instead asked if they had considered letting me go to an arts high school for dance. I have felt indebted to him ever since.
I have on occasion attempted to bring my love of dance into the classroom, and not infrequently use it as a frame of reference when trying to grasp new concepts. When we talk about gender roles, my mind inevitably turns to the tradition of ballet, which firmly relegates males and females to different choreographic parts[1]. When we discuss sexualisation, my thoughts turn to the alarming sexualisation of young children – mainly female – at dance competitions. When my sociology of education classes feel hopeless, I try to think back to my experiences of attending an arts high school, and I am reminded that there are alternative ways of approaching education.
I had a field day with my first aesthetics class in philosophy. I leaped at the opportunity to relate every assignment back to dance, which eventually led to me taking on an independent study on the aesthetics of dance. Though I enjoyed the independent study, I quickly realized that dance for me exists outside of the realm of the written word. My professor pointed out that my papers were riddled with unsubstantiated claims – but everyone can dance! We are born dancers! – and I learned that having the privilege to experience dance is enough for me. I do not want to try to capture something so elusive, magical in its nebulousness. Scrutiny can undermine sanctity. 
This summer my psychologist told me to make a list of all of my commitments I had signed up for during the school year. She instructed me to choose three to keep for certain, and to rank the rest in order of how much they would increase my stress and decrease the quality of my work. I tried to argue that my dance classes should not count as one of the three guaranteed commitments, because, like Gillian, who makes time for roller derby despite her packed schedule, dance is a given in my life. I simply don’t function without it. I take as many dance classes as I can, and have taught and choreographed dance for years. When I am asked what I do for fun (the list is scant), I sometimes forget to list dance because it is such an integral part of my life and identity that I do not see it as a hobby.
When I improvise, I feel seen, known, and understood. Improvising leaves no room to premeditate, no time to plan, curate, or refine the image you want to portray. This stands in stark contrast to my imposter syndrome and general insecurity, both of which cause me to feel like I am constantly “faking it”, and have yet to be found out for the (inadequate, terrible) person I really am. Being able to return to my body and know that embedded within it is an authentic version of myself is a blessing. Further, no one has ever been able to figure out why I approach everything in my life but dance with unceasing perfectionism. Somehow I have managed to reserve this one space in which I am allowed to simply be, and to enjoy myself. Though this is not the case for many dancers, especially those attempting to make a professional career out of dance and often those studying ballet, I am thankful to say my dance remains perfectionism-free.

Throwback to high school.
If you read this, and thought to yourself, “I wish I could dance,” please know that you can. Everyone can dance. I truly believe it is only socialized inhibitions, and perhaps in some cases, the limits and abilities of our bodies, that prevent us from dancing as we age. So turn off the lights and turn on your favourite song. And if you have a child and the means to do so, consider enrolling them in a dance class. You never know, you or they might just be someone who has to dance too.
 
My dance playlist is always evolving, but here are some songs that have stuck with me over the years (as well as a few that I am enjoying too much right now not to include).
Fast Car – Tracy Chapman
Galileo – Indigo Girls
Hometown Glory – Adele
Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
Lose Yourself- Eminem
Regretless – Richard Walters
Rules for Lovers – Richard Walters
School Night –Ani DiFranco
Sweet Disposition – The Temper Trap
The General – Dispatch
The Great Escape – Patrick Watson
The Man Who Can’t Be Moved – The Script
Unfold – Jason Mraz
World Spins Madly On – The Weepies
Caroline Kovesi is a fourth year student at Mount Allison University. She is pursuing an Honours Bachelor of Arts in sociology with a minor in philosophy. She is passionate about de-stigmatizing mental health. Her academic work often focuses on the intersection of mental illness, disability, accessibility, and higher education. She recently started a blog exploring such topics called “for the love of a bear.”

[1] There are, though, some pretty fantastic ballet troupes beginning to play with gender bending, like Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Check this video out.
academic reorganization · guest post · kinaesthetic thinking · play · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: Daily Affirmation

erinewunker

I thought I was going to use this much appreciated opportunity to write out some kind of overarching argument for the importance of the intersection between athletics and academics, particularly for women. But as I’ve thought about this issue over the last month, it turns out I can’t in good conscience make this argument at all as women still, by far, undertake the majority of both service work in the university workplace and caretaking at home, a dreary and undebatable fact that means I’d be truly wrapped up in my own privilege if I were to say, “hey all you women, you really need to try training for something on top of all the other duties and responsibilities and drains on your time! I mean, it’s really great and you’ll feel good about yourself!”

It is great. And it does make you feel good about yourself. But the time I’ve spent as a competitive cyclist and now runner/occasional triathlete have shown me how the barriers to participation, let alone access, are still very high. I’ll return to this point toward the end of my post but to explain how I’ve come to this point, I’m afraid I need to indulge in some autobiography about my history as an athlete.

I’ve always been active and in love with running around and doing things, whether kicking or catching a ball, riding my bike on dirt or on roads, running around a track, or running on trails. But I always did this activities without any support network, with no understanding of training or technique or even nutrition, and – with the exception women like Missy Giove that I’d see in glossy magazines – with almost no role models. This isn’t surprising considering I grew up in the 70s and 80s, on what was then the isolated world of Vancouver Island. Still, I had this lurking belief I could be good at sport – that I was capable and strong, even if there was no real evidence for this belief.

Maybe it’s no coincidence my history as an academic followed a similar path, guided by my belief that maybe I could do this thing even if no one else around me thought one way or the other. So, after a few nerve-wracking years as a perpetually insecure, workaholic PhD student, I decided I’d try to build up my self-confidence from having almost none to, hopefully, at least having some. I started by coming up with an arbitrary amount of body fat I wanted to get down to at the local gym (incredibly, my personal life remained completely divorced from the work by Susan Bordo I was teaching at the same time), moved on to trying to do a sprint triathlon, and then – when we moved to Boulder, Colorado – trying what was for me the most intimidating of all: road bike racing.

I threw myself into training and racing road bikes for five years and, for those years, the sport gave me everything I was missing in the academic workplace. I wanted community, friends and connection and I found these things in spades, especially as a beginning Cat 4 racer. These women I trained and raced with, week in and week out for months at a time, were incredible – we pushed each other harder than we thought was possible; we learned together; we cheered each other on; we suffered together. It was a remarkable experience, especially compared to the profoundly isolationist and individualistic culture of academia.

Those years racing and training also made me a more interesting person, one who became capable of talking with lawyers, accountants, physiotherapists, marketing managers, and sales associates. Not only did I learn about and engage with communities outside of academia but I also developed a more expanded sense of where exactly I stood in relation to my local and global community. It’s such an obvious revelation, that existing only in a university environment makes one uni-dimensional. It’s also obvious one cannot and should not work as many hours a day and days a week as one can hack. But somehow, academia – largely made up of type-A personalities who cannot stop striving seven days a week because of the lack of clear work-life boundaries – makes access to these obvious revelations very difficult.

I quit training and racing road bikes a couple years ago when I realized I’d achieved the goal I’d set out for myself (all I wanted was to become a Cat 2 racer, because somehow, narrowly, I thought that would mean I could finally tell myself I was “good” at this sport) and I was finding the 15 hours of training a week onerous rather than empowering. But still, the act of training taught me one lesson in particular that still hasn’t left me: the value of having clear and bounded goals coupled with an acceptance of what I have today, who I am today, instead of who I could be or would like to be or should be.

Instead of the quiet but ever-present pressure in academia to continually work and produce, without rest and very often without end and without any clear indication of success (when is our work ever done? If you work for five years or longer to write a book and then wait a year and a half, sometimes two years, for the book to come out and be read by so few people, where is the triumph?), bike training presented me with the daily challenge to complete this set task, in this particular manner, in this set amount of time. Daily I’d ask myself, “Can I do this thing? Even though I’m tired? Even though I don’t feel great and even though I don’t have a lot of time? Can I push my body that hard? Can I finish the workout?” And very often the answer turned out to be “Yes, I can show up only with what I have to give today and yes, I can do this thing!”

Eventually, the tiny, daily acknowledgements of what I had to give, given the circumstances of the day, turned into tiny, daily triumphs and then these triumphs came to influence both the way I go about my work as an academic and the way I think about my worth. Eventually, I came to ask myself, “Can I write 500 words today? Can I teach my classes with the knowledge and the energy I have today, rather than what I would like to have? Can I do this work in this two hours I have, before I spend time with my husband or my friends, rather than the eight hours I wish I had?”

All I have to offer here are my personal revelations about why my personal and professional life would be so much less if it weren’t for sport. I especially can only speak for myself here, as I’m reminded of the day I showed up for my first cat 2 race and I saw only women who were either professional bike racers or women who were retired or women whose children were now in college or women who were fortunate enough not to have to work at all. It’s a tremendous privilege to have the time and the resources I have to train, to hire a coach, to travel to races, to set goal race times and so on.

The Author!

I know countless women who are tremendously gifted athletes but who cannot possibly add training to their already nearly impossible schedules involving work, committee meetings, student supervision/mentoring, not to mention their own childcare and housework responsibilities. I only wish we could find a way not so much to say, “You can do it! You can train for that event and compete in that race!” but rather, “We value your health, happiness, and sense of well-being! We support a shorter work week and after-school child care! We support a more even distribution of childcare and service responsibilities across genders!” 

Then imagine what women could accomplish.



Lori Emerson is amateur runner, cyclist, and fresh air lover in Boulder, Colorado. She is also an Associate Professor of English and Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance at the University of Colorado and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. 

academic reorganization · guest post · kinaesthetic thinking · play · women and sport

Women, Academia, Sport: Academia On Wheels

erinewunker
                                                       Academia on Wheels
 
The Author! Photo credit: Martyn Boston
“What are you going to do to reduce the stress in your life?” the doctor asked me in September 2012 after I described the shooting head pains I’d been having for five months. We’d also discussed my middle-of-the-night hospitalization in July for chest pains the day before I submitted the manuscript for my second monograph.
My response to the doctor’s question? I laughed. My teaching term was beginning in two weeks. I couldn’t conceive of anything it was in my power to do, bar quitting my job, that would effect any sort of meaningful stress reduction.
But I did do something in the fall of 2012 that took me a while to connect to what the doctor had asked me: I went to a roller derby recruitment event. I had figure skated as a child, but I knew nothing about roller derby. A friend of mine had recently become involved (another academic, who is now a fantastic roller derby referee), however, and encouraged me to do the same. I watched Whip It!and was confused (turns out it’s not terribly representative of the actual sport). But the recruitment event was held down the road from my house, I was curious, and I had nothing to lose.
For those who don’t know (and/or have been equally confused by Whip It!), roller derby is a contact sport played on quad roller skates. Although men play it, too (both on men’s and co-ed teams), roller derby, in its current incarnation, is a twenty-first-century phenomenon initially devised for women. Its much-vaunted ethos of “by the skaters, for the skaters” has the effect of bolstering a sense of community both on- and off-track. While individual skaters may have different senses of themselves in relation to feminism, on the whole I would say that roller derby constitutes an empowering, feminist space.
What a difference, then, to the oftentimes explicit misogyny of the academic workplace. And while I often get asked about the risk of injury in roller derby—“Isn’t it really violent?”—I can’t help but think of myself in that doctor’s office, as she tried to point out what my body was telling me three years ago: it had had enough of what my job was putting me through.
“When do you have time?” I’m also asked, given my commitments not only as a skater on both A and B squads, but also, currently, a member of our training committee. When I started roller derby, I skated in the evening of my heaviest teaching day of the week, when the last thing I could do was keep working, and the only thing I could do, it seemed, was skate.
Gradually, I realised that roller derby was helping to save me. My acupuncturist, whom I consulted about those mysterious shooting head pains, told me I should think about my feet. It occurred to me that skating ensured I was thinking about my feet: certainly, to think about work in the middle of a contact sport would have been foolish. My feet enabled me to give my head a break.
When I was lying in the hospital bed in July 2012, I caught myself worrying about whether I would die before my book came out. My chest pains, thankfully, turned out to have a muscular, rather than cardiac, source, brought on by a six-week cough and the toll on my body of the final push towards my manuscript deadline. I was discharged in the morning.
But I was determined, as an academic working in the UK system structured not only by a lack of tenure (abolished, surprise surprise, by Thatcher) but also by “Research Excellence Framework” imperatives, never again to let myself think about my mortality as a publication record problem. I was determined to reclaim something resembling a life, and a healthy one at that.
It may seem paradoxical to think about a contact sport as a form of self-care, but roller derby has almost certainly played that role for me. And while my academic career is likely to last longer than my roller derby career, I am convinced that I am only able to keep going in the former because of powerful lessons taught to me by the latter.
Gillian Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University. Her focus is on Canadian cultural texts and their circulation and celebration examines how the boundaries of ‘Canadianness’ are constructed and reconstructed according to opportunities for Canada to accrue cultural power. Her work consistently returns to hospitality discourse both in its engagement with immigrant and hyphenate Canadian writers who become internationally celebrated and in my interest in the Canada-US border: in both these areas, she is interested in how a ‘Canadian host position’ is constructed, as well as in the discrepancy between Canada’s projection of itself as hospitable and the exclusivity with which ‘Canadianness’ is often defined. Her second monograph, Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border, has recently been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (2015).