With respect to sport psychology professionals becoming more politicized (including consultants within the academy), we also have little to offer in the way of evidence. What we do know is that since our 2003 article other scholars have continued to articulate the importance of not only cultural studies, but of culture itself within sport psychology. As previously mentioned, the publication of Schinke and Hanrahan’s (2009) groundbreaking book on cultural sport psychology is but one example of this trend towards examining cultural issues related to the field. However, we still have little data on how to make CS or CSP work with SP, and how students engage with related ideas. Indeed, some scholars have noted that even within cultural studies, there is a relative lack of research on pedagogy (Maton & Wright, 2002). In other words, if the trend towards a cultural sport psychology, and to some extent a cultural studies-infused approach to the field, is to continue we must examine how students take up issues of culture, particularly those issues that may be considered to the left, politically. While our biggest organization, AASP, is not explicitly conservative by any means, we argue that by not addressing or otherwise marginalizing these issues, the applied field positions itself directly in opposition to the project we are advocating. In an effort to more closely examine the experiences of sport psychology graduate students learning about and engaging with cultural studies and to determine how their educational experiences affected their eventual careers as sport psychology professionals, Butryn (2008) conducted an exploratory story using in-depth interviews with seven former doctoral students, all of whom had been trained in both sport psychology and, to different extents, cultural studies. Participants were currently employed in a variety of university academic settings and most were doing some sort of consulting with athletes. The interviews lasted between 45 to 75 minutes and focused on figural experiences and engagement with the graduate curriculum, their perceptions of the relationship between sport psychology and cultural studies, occasions when they felt or witnessed resistance to cultural studies, and the ways, if any, that their cultural studies training affected their current sport psychology research, teaching, or service activities. Following data analysis and several peer review sessions with a colleague with an expertise in interview-based research, several thematic categories were identified. Due to space constraints, we chose to focus here on the two themes that are most relevant to this discussion: (a) interdisciplinarity; and (b) relevance of cultural studies to the current professional setting.
One of the main themes was interdisciplinarity. Of course, several authors have written about the need for interdisciplinary work in sport psychology, and as Silva (2001) noted, “By 2010, sport psychology graduate programs will become interdisciplinary through the formation of applied curricula at the doctoral level” (p. 829). Gill (2007) also stated that interdisciplinarity must expand into academic spaces outside of mainstream psychology to account for the potential salience of social identity in sport. Social identit(ies) are a major thrust in cultural studies work, and therefore it is not surprising that authors such as Ryba and Wright (2005) have also advocated a cultural studies approach to sport psychology, in part to address dearth of sport psychology research that takes issues of racial and ethnic identities, for example, as both salient and central components of one’s sporting experiences (Peters & Williams, 2006; Ram, Starek, & Johnson, 2004).
All of the participants in Butryn’s study had positive views of the emphasis on, and extreme openness to, interdisciplinary work in their sport psychology doctoral programs. They pointed to specific times when, often as a result of their cultural studies coursework, they almost stumbled upon their dissertation topics that drew from cultural studies, phenomenology, feminist studies, and critical race theory. As one individual put it, “I remember that day, and the lightbulb came off… I was like, ‘Yeah, this fits!’…And then every project that I did whether in counseling or in like [another CS class] was geared to [my topic]. I just got jazzed about it and it took off.” Another participant noted that, while cultural studies is always and already politicized, the individuals’ advisors realized that not all of their sport psychology cohort identified as politically leftist. As a result, “I think that each one of us had a dissertation topic that we were really given the ok to run with. As radical or not radical as you wanted it to be you could go with it.” Pedagogically, then, we argue that, while we still maintain that there is a great need for a cultural studies emphasis within sport psychology curriculum, we also recognize that individual departments will have to decide what sort of cultural studies projects fit best within their context.
The other theme that has implications for this chapter is related to participants’ perceptions of how their graduate education - specifically their cultural studies coursework - impacted their current research and teaching endeavors. With respect to research, all of the participants noted that the major strength of their cultural studies education was that they not only learned a great deal about qualitative methodologies, but a variety of qualitative methods. Two participants explained that they took these qualitative forms of inquiry and directed them to non-traditional issues in sport psychology. As one individual said:
My focus and passion shifted. After I went through the CS classes, I was like, ‘I want to increase the quality of life for this athlete...I want to know how these athletes are being treated.’ My whole [research] question and my passions changed!
Regarding their current teaching experiences, some participants who were teaching at what they described as more conservative universities or departments described how their unique academic training was, at times, something that was both positive and something they had to carefully negotiate. As one individual put it, “If you look at my syllabus compared to someone else in my department, they’re completely different...the topics that we do. This is the first time these students have been exposed to this!” Another participant also noted that although s/he incorporated issues of whiteness and male privilege into his/her group dynamics course, s/he had to do so in ways that were digestible to the mostly conservative, straight, white students.
Finally, participants talked about how their general approaches to sport psychology, particularly the applied domain, had changed during the years since their graduate training. While a few of them reported no meaningful changes, and more specifically no “lasting effects” from their cultural studies training, five of the participants reported what might be described as paradigm shifts over the five to ten years since receiving their degrees. These individuals recognized that although they may or may not be “doing cultural studies” in the truest sense, they were consciously aware of, and negotiating, the politics of their work. As one participant who was a decade removed from his/her doctoral training noted, “I always ask myself, ‘Who benefits from this?’ That was a theme throughout the curriculum for me. We
critically analyze educational practices, the institutional practices in a lot of ways... so one of the things I do is just say, ‘Who benefits from this?’.”
Quotes like the ones above clearly illustrate that even though former graduate students receiving cultural studies training in the sport psychology curriculum may not always fully embrace every aspect of it, they understand a key element of cultural studies, which is the notion that something is always “at stake” in cultural studies work and in academic work in general. Indeed, three participants explicitly made the choice to do more critical sport psychology work and to use critical feminist and race theories to address questions that they perceived were marginalized within mainstream sport psychology. In total, although this study was preliminary and the participant number was small, the results, nevertheless, demonstrated that the infusion of cultural studies into sport psychology graduate programs has the potential, at least, to fundamentally alter the ways that new professionals “do” sport psychology. Further, even students who might not fully embrace cultural studies as a political project still gain some exposure to how issues of identity, culture, and power impact sport and their work with students and athletes. Indeed, although sport and the field of sport psychology would never be considered “progressive” social spaces, they are not inherently and permanently “un-progressive.” As Howell, Andrews, and Jackson (2002) noted, while cultural practices are produced from specific social and historical contexts, they are also actively engaged in the ongoing constitution of those contexts” (p. 171). In other words, the “contextual, specific, and political intellectual practice” (172) of cultural studies has the potential, when strategically and intentionally deployed, to perhaps alter some of the power dynamics and cultural sensibilities of sport and sport psychology.
S
UMMARYWe ended our 2003 paper with a discussion related to Morgan (2000) who contested that if we don’t help athletes – and we contend, ourselves as applied sport psychology professionals - become better “citizens” soon, we may find ourselves in a sporting practice and culture “…that is largely narcissistic and self-indulgent rather than liberating and community-building” (Fisher, Butryn, & Roper, 2003, p.599). We still believe this to be the case. We are hopeful, however, with the recent addition of texts (Andersen, 2005; Schinke & Hanrahan, 2009) and studies (Blodgett et al., in press; Blodgett et al., in press; Butryn, 2008; Fasting Brackenridge, & Walseth, 2007; Roper, 2008a) which examine power, privilege, and praxis that we continue to see movement toward a more global, culturally sensitive and aware group of sport psychology professionals. While sparse, it appears that a small group of scientist-practitioners in the field of applied sport psychology have begun to engage with cultural sport psychology (see Schinke & Hanrahan, 2008). And, many of these have also been invited to write chapters in two other innovative edited texts that are on their way in 2009 (Ryba, Schinke, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Hanrahan & Andersen, 2009).
One suggestion for bringing some of the issues we have discussed to the forefront of the field is to feature, rather than simply integrate, topics related to identity politics, democratic politics, and so on into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. While cultural studies research in sport psychology is still lacking, there is certainly enough to develop a substantive unit of study within an applied sport psychology course. Indeed, we see the recent textbooks
dealing with cultural sport psychology and the inclusion of cultural issues in other mainstream sport psychology texts as a sign that professionals in sport psychology see these issues as vital to the development of a strong, global field. Only time will tell if others will be interested in this integration of cultural studies and sport psychology into curriculums and practice.
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