Prof. Kitrina Douglas: What can Narrative Theory tell us about Meaning in Sport?

I had the honor to interview Prof. Kitrina Douglas – whose work has inspired me throughout my academic life – on her work on narrative identity in sport.

Part 1 here:

Kitrina played professional golf for a long time before becoming a researcher, and her autoethnographic work demonstrates how she felt completely disconnected from the ways that she as an athlete was represented in the media. Her doctoral research then demonstrated that athletes can tell different stories – such as discovery or relational stories – but that the media and also sport researchers tend to subscribe to a performance narrative where athletes are assumed to be completely focused on winning and performance at the expense of other dimensions of life and self. In the podcast, Kitrina tells a fascinating story of this research that has had a massive impact on how many researchers, myself included, think about identity in sport.

In the podcast, we also discuss the ways that athletes can resist the dominant narratives. How can athletes find different stories that allow them to experience alternative meanings and think, feel and live differently?

In the second part, we discuss the questions about “dual career”. Is the combination of sport and education becoming a new dominant narrative that demands athletes to excel both in sport and education at the same time. Is this a sustainable development and what are some of the dark sides to this new script of “a good career”?

Part 2 here:

… And in the second part, you’ll also hear a poem that Kitrina has written to communicate her research findings, as well as insights from her other arts-based research!

Kitrina Douglas is a Professor at the University of West London (UK), a Senior Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University (UK), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). She has been one of the pioneers in the narrative study of athletes’ lives. Her narrative typology of performance, discovery and relational narratives of sport, developed together with Dr David Carless, has been a foundation for a number of studies that have followed. In today’s episode, she shares fascinating stories from her research and life as an elite athlete, and how she developed and maintained multiple self-stories that were not disrupted by successes and failures experienced in sport.

Examples of Kitrina’s numerous research articles on narrative, identity and sport include:

Challenging interpretive privilege in elite and professional sport: one [athlete’s] story, revised, reshaped and reclaimed

Living, resisting, and playing the part of athlete: Narrative tensions in elite sport

For inspiration and more information about Kitrina’s arts-based work, you can visit her YouTube channel.