Michelle Helstein - University of Lethbridge
Français
The Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport and Physical Activity (CAAWS) is the only national public sector initiative and the only multi-sport organization in Canada charged exclusively with promoting and enhancing sport and physical activity for girls and women. In this privileged position as the predominant public sector voice, CAAWS has the potential to offer competing, more diverse and just, representations of active females than might be expected of profit motivated private companies. The proposed research will ascertain whether this is the case through an analysis of how private sector funding in Canadian sport impacts upon representations of female sport participants in Canada. Popularly, CAAWS is considered an advocacy group and its representations of the female sport participant are framed, for example, within discourses of empowerment, participation, diversity and inclusion. However, the CAAWS leadership has also acknowledged discourses of marketing, efficiency, commodification, and corporatization as legitimate (CAAWS, 2006). Through the systematic collection and review of CAAWS promotional materials this research will ascertain if these latter discourses, which seem necessary given current federal funding regimes (Sport Canada, 2006b), are intersecting, marginalizing, and/or silencing the former discourses and impacting the ways in which female sport participants are represented by CAAWS. Given the power of representation to communicate, legitimate, and reify certain types of knowledge and identity, the representations produced by CAAWS are significant texts that need to be explored for their politics. This research aims to identify who and what counts as a female sport participant within public sector representations produced by CAAWS at a historical moment marked by increased private sector funding. The research will contribute to a necessary discussion of the place of private sector funding within CAAWS specifically and the Canadian sport delivery system generally.
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