Centralising space: the physical education and physical activity experiences of South Asian, Muslim girls

Abstract

1This paper explores the PE and physical activity experiences of a group of South Asian, Muslim girls, 2 a group typically marginalised in PE and physical activity research. The study responds to on going of domination and the notion of intersectionality. These concepts offer the possibility to explore the 6 kinds of settings (physical, social, cultural) in which girls undertake PE and physical activity; how 7 these spaces influence experience; and how the girls navigate these spaces. The study is based in a 8 large, urban, co-educational, secondary school in Yorkshire, England (95% of the students are from 9 minority ethnic communities, 91% are Muslim, and 63% live in the top 10% most deprived 10 neighbourhoods in the country). Data generation involved three phases: observations, creating 11 research artefacts in focus groups, and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal the diverse ways the 12 girls are physically active. They also demonstrate a complexity to their involvement which is 13 contingent upon space, discourses and people. For example, discourses of competition, ability, and 14 peers, are more significant within PE; whilst family, religion and culture feature beyond this context. 15The paper concludes by acknowledging the girls' heterogeneity and agency in the ways they 16 strategically navigate spaces in their quest to be physically active on their terms. 17

Ethics in Categorizing Ethnicity and Disability in Research with Children

“…Not knowing the ethnic backgrounds of the students also raised issues around power relationships between the researcher and the children. Blurring the lines of ethnicity challenged me to reflect critically upon the ways in which my own background informed the questions and observations [41]. However, it possibly made it more difficult to reveal how issues related to ethnicity often work in subtle ways [42].…”

“…At the beginning of the fieldwork, a number of the non-participating children were identified by one of the physical education teachers as bilingual and having an ethnic minority background. As the purpose of the project was to generate stories of children with ethnic minority backgrounds and to investigate the inter-ethnic relations between students of minority and majority backgrounds [12,41], the non-participating students constituted an important target group. Issues related to recruitment and consent are particularly urgent in research relying on certain categories as the starting point [10].…”

‘Homing in’: South Asian, Muslim young women and their physical activity in and around the home

“…A second concern is the way such surveys neatly categorise individuals by gender, social class, ethnicity and disability. In this way, particular aspects of identity become foregrounded and differences within categories become invisible (Stride, 2016). For example, large scale quantitative surveys of physical activity in England explore men's and women's participation and those of different ethnic groups.…”

‘I don’t want my parents’ respect going down the drain’: South Asian, Muslim young women negotiating family and physical activity

“…However, this gap is beginning to be addressed through the work of a small group of scholars. For example, Dagkas, Benn and Jawad (2011) and Stride (2014a;2014b) exploring Muslim young women's experiences of school Physical Education (PE); and research focusing on minority ethnic young women's broader experiences of physical activity (Azzarito & Hill, 2013;Hamzeh, 2011;Knez, Macdonald, & Abbott, 2012). Yet, this work remains at the margins of scholarly thought in comparison to the extensive research that considers White women's and girls' experiences.…”