G-y-m not J-i-m

Sam B

6 years ago

Recently Tracy and I got an email from a new post doc at Western. Her name is Stephanie Coen and she works in the Geography department. The cool thing, and the reason she got in touch with us, is that she works on gender and spaces for physical activity. Her website says, “My research in health geography is driven by an overarching concern for how everyday social and material contexts matter for health and health equity. I am particularly interested in how taken-for-granted—and often unquestioned—features of our day-to-day environments become implicated in the production of health outcomes, behaviours, and inequities.”

We had a great lunch and talked about powerlifting. That’s Stephanie’s sport. And we talked about academic life in general. We also talked about her latest publication. It’s called, “It’s gym, like g-y-m not J-i-m”: Exploring the role of place in the gendering of physical activity.”

There’s a link to the paper here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617306536?via%3Dihub#sec6

And Stephanie gave us an author link that gives open access till the end of December so everyone can read it: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1W0uu-CmUdwEe

ABSTRACT: Although gyms are potentially sites for health promotion, they may also be places where gendered inequities in health opportunities emerge and are sustained. Our findings demonstrate that micro-level processes at the scale of the everyday exercise environment work to routinize gender disparities and differences in physical activity. Public health efforts to close the gender gap in physical activity must account for the socio-spatial processes that reproduce, as well as challenge, gender hegemony in everyday physical activity places such as the gym.

One of the things I love about the blog are meeting researchers from around the university and further afield whose work connects them to the blog.

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