Michael Giardina

Published: Mar 05, 2017 by Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health
Authors: Michael D. Giardina
Subjects: Sociology, Sports and Leisure

In this article, I address some of the emerging debates surrounding the ontological turn in qualitative inquiry. To do so, I highlight recent conversations in the field related to evidence, knowledge and research practices. Framing these conversations as part of a broader ‘methodologically contested present’ within qualitative inquiry, I attend to the ways in which qualitative researchers in the field of sport, exercise and health-related disciplines are pushing these conversations forward.

Published: Mar 09, 2015 by Sport in Society
Authors: Haozhou Pu and Michael D. Giardina

The idea of ‘collective victimhood’, as a cultural and political identity, has long been cultivated by the state within the construction of Chinese nationalism. Through a case study analysis of Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen at the 2012 London Olympics, the authors examine the cultural pedagogy behind the national production and consumption of such ‘victimhood’ within China.

Published: Feb 03, 2015 by Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies
Authors: Amber L. Wiest, David L. Andrews, and Michael D. Giardina

In this article, the authors posit that it is imperative to examine what health means to different people so that we can better understand how various articulations of ‘healthy’ (and ‘fit’) manifest in ways that reproduce—or, conversely have the potential to challenge—social inequities and injustices.

Published: Sep 03, 2014 by Critical Studies in Media Communication
Authors: Kyle S. Bunds, Joshua I. Newman, and Michael D. Giardina

The authors offer a critical analysis of the mediation and commercialization of “bum fighting” (videotaping two or more poverty stricken individuals engaged in low-dollar bloodsport) vis-a-vis what we can learn from these 1) deeply corporeal mediations and 2) radically political public pedagogies. They also consider how these popular media constructs locate certain bodies as abject and thereby disposable.

Published: Jul 09, 2013 by Sport in Society
Authors: Adam Beissel, Joshua Newman, Michael D. Giardina

Within this article, the authors chronicle the transformation of a city, a region, and a group of people, at once steeped in the hard life of steel production and factory work, now increasingly replaced by non-physical work and suburban lifestyle of the informational economy. As in the decades before, today's Steelers football team certainly operate as a symbolic reminder of the region's identity, framed around the hard work of factory life and industrial manufacturing.

Published: May 02, 2013 by Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies
Authors: Ryan King-White, Joshua Newman, Michael D. Giardina

In this article, we call into question the role that health and bio-sciences have played in constructing and resolving the obesity epidemic.To this end, we draw upon various strands of social and political economic theory to problematize the ways in which obesity studies are at once constrained by (1) the limits of modern science's nomothetic positivism and (2) the broader social, political, and economic formations acting upon researching and researched glut.

Published: Dec 16, 2009 by Sport in Society
Authors: Michael D. Giardina

This essay addresses lifestyle sport brand PUMA and its recent activist endeavours with respect to ‘Africa’. The author looks at PUMA's transformation-based branding strategy of peace and social justice in which supporters are charged with affecting change themselves in concrete interactions. Likewise, the author discusses the role of Cameroonian footballer Samuel Eto'o and his location to PUMA's mediated efforts and brand footprint on the continent.

Published: Jan 24, 2006 by International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Authors: Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Michael D. Giardina

In this article, the authors contest methodological fundamentalism, and interrogate the politics of re‐emergent scientism, the place of qualitative research in mixed‐methods experimentalism, and the pragmatic criticisms of anti‐foundationalism. Furthermore, they outline three models of scientifically based research (SBR), and discuss how each is operative within the current historical conjuncture.