Negotiations of power and gender in studio conversations about cross-country skiing.

Project description

Media has an institutional power position when it comes to sports, i.e. to choose what sports to cover and how to frame the broadcasts. The research questions in this study are: Which possibilities do female and male athletes, experts and commentators have to negotiate for powerful positions in interaction in the studio conversations and in the commentary of sports? How are they being positioned? The material for the study is a large international sports event with both female and male athletes, framed with studio conversations.

Studies on sports in media regarding female and male athletes have focused on femininity/masculinity, mentioning of athletes etc.
In the three-year plan for the study I will: Collect material, transcribe and analyse material using a multimodal conversation oriented feminist discourse analysis, and write articles. The conversations will be studied multimodal (verbal speech, gestures, facial expression, gaze and body position). In the discourse analytical framework, negotiation of power relations and notions of gender will be studied. The study also has an intersectional perspective, investigating different social categorizing when the participants in the conversations are being positioned.
It will be a big benefit for me to spend two years in Innsbruck University and collaborate with other researchers in gender, with their interdisciplinary gender network, and with subgroups in queer studies.