Sporty study takes academic offshore

Waikato University academic and keen snowboarder Dr Holly Thorpe has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship which will take her to Britain for a year.

The year-long fellowships are offered by the Leverhulme Trust to a number of UK universities to enable them to invite one or two post-doctoral academic researchers to the UK for research and collaboration. Dr Thorpe will be going to the University of Brighton.

Dr Thorpe currently lectures in sport, exercise and leisure psychology in the Department of Sport and Leisure Studies at Waikato. For her PhD she researched social theory and female physical youth culture, focusing particularly on global snowboarding culture.

“The fellowship is a brilliant opportunity to enhance collaboration with international colleagues and further advance my research,” says Dr Thorpe who will take up the fellowship in November.

She will be based in the Sport and Leisure Cultures Department at the Chelsea School where she will give lectures to students and staff, participate in the intellectual life of the institution, and continue her research.

“The university has a critical mass of world-class scholars in youth cultures, sports sociology, alternative and lifestyle sports, plus media studies, so I’ll get to work on a number of exciting projects as well as my own research.”

Dr Thorpe also hopes to secure further funding to complete new research during her year away.

In particular, she aims to investigate the travel, leisure and sport experiences of contemporary youth, by conducting a number of phases of field work in transnational ‘youth cultural hot spots’ such as Chamonix (France), Queenstown and Whistler (Canada).

She says this research will contribute to our understanding of national, transnational and diasporic cultural identities.

“It will feed into broader questions about the politics of migration, including questions about how youth develop a sense of belonging and ownership of place and space in the early 21st century.”

Dr Thorpe says the fellowship will help her to make strong international connections with scholars at Brighton, the UK and Europe.

“I anticipate returning with lots of fresh ideas for my teaching and research,” she says.