Tag: #gender

Fostering Inclusivity in Mountain Biking

Posted on by George Thomas

By Emma Frazer, PhD Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies candidate, School of Modern Languages

To continue our series spotlighting PGR summer internship projects, PhD Latin American Studies candidate Emma Frazer tells us about working with Professor Martin Hurcombe and Associate Professor Fiona Spotswood on their interdisciplinary project, Fostering Inclusivity in Action Sports. With the project at an advanced stage in engaging with audiences beyond academic circles, Emma reflects on the invaluable lessons the experience has offered in developing and presenting her own research.

Over the summer of 2024, I conducted a six-week PGR internship with Professor Martin Hurcombe and Associate Professor Fiona Spotswood. I had previously assisted them with an event called Game On, which involved a documentary-screening and academic discussion group on women’s sports. This internship provided me with the opportunity to continue working with them. They have created a framework that works on Fostering Inclusivity in Action Sports (FIAS), with a focus on women in mountain biking.

My PhD is researching the ways in which playing football empowers women beyond the pitch, exploring the cases of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, where I conducted my ethnographic research. The FIAS project has also used ethnographic research, and is again exploring women in sports, but it is further along than my own research, which means it has provided me with a really useful insight into how my work could develop in the future.

In particular, during my internship, the FIAS project has been at the stage of working on impact and dissemination by exploring case studies and reaching out to wider audiences. They have been experimenting with different ways to present their findings within the mountain biking community and beyond, including sporting institutions, stakeholders and policy-makers. It has been invaluable to learn how projects can progress from the research stage and be disseminated to a wider audience, beyond academic circles, and how the impact of that can begin to be measured too.

The Fostering Inclusivity in Action Sports (FIAS) Framework SnapshotDownload
  • To navigate through the framework, use the grey bar on the right hand side of the screen.
  • To view the framework in full screen, right click the above hyperlink and select first option.

My internship began with me working with their framework in the form of editing a presentation, as well as a short and long framework. By presenting their work in different formats of different lengths, I was able to see how the work can be adapted depending on the audience and the objective, with varying amounts of detail included. It also showed me the importance of strong, cohesive messaging, as well as clear, actionable goals. From there I developed a two-pager document myself for the project, which can be disseminated to organisations and stakeholders, but which can also be used as a policy brief.

Following the two-pager, I wrote up case studies of different women’s mountain biking organisations who have used the framework. This was a useful process as it showed me how I might include the case studies from my own ethnographic research within my PhD, as well as how they can be presented in the future dissemination of my work. 

(L-R) Associate Professor Fiona Spotswood chairs a panel discussion with Sue Anstiss MBE, Aneela McKenna (Mòr Diversity), Aoife Glass, Zoe Woodman and Professor Jean Williams.

Finally, I was involved in the marketing strategy for how to effectively reach different audiences with the framework. Having done some research, it was clear that direct messaging to members of different mountain biking and action sports organisations would be the most effective method. These can range from local groups, such as Women Ride Bristol, to cycling institutions, such as British Cycling. I then reached out through various groups to pass on the framework.

As a result of the internship, I have been able to learn the dissemination process of academic work to a wider audience, as well as how to provide the tools so that the research can have an impact in the real world, and how to measure any impact it might have.

Emma Frazer is a PhD Latin American Studies candidate with research interests in Latin America, sports, gender, empowerment, and ethnographic fieldwork. To read more about the FIAS project with Professor Martin Hurcombe and Associate Professor Fiona Spotswood, including the recently launched toolkit and framework, visit the project website and Instagram. To read more PGR summer internship projects, visit ArtsMatter.

The feminine art of the hustle: how Britons became obsessed with working for themselves

Posted on by George Thomas

By Dr Amy Edwards, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, School of Humanities

To celebrate International Women’s Day, Dr Amy Edwards tells us about her project which will explore the history of women’s self-employment between 1970 and 2000. Through oral history interviews and archival research, the project will tell the story of the many thousands of women who worked for themselves in contemporary Britain. The project recently received an AHRC Research Development and Engagement Fellowship and runs until August 2025.

The way we work in contemporary Britain is changing. Working from home, hustle culture, flexi-work, the gig economy: these are all familiar phrases that capture something about the nature of when, how, and for who we earn money in the twenty-first century. At the heart of many of these developments is the idea that working for ourselves is a dream job.

My current project, ‘The Secret of My Success’: Women and Self-Employment in Britain (1970-2000), seeks to tell the history of Britain’s self-employed women to better understand our ways of working today. Working arrangements and business practices targeted at women throughout the post-war period pre-empted many of the ‘new norms’ we view as recent developments. In 1965, the Financial Times reported that British industry had begun ‘assiduously courting’ some ‘seven million married women’ as part of a drive to boost its labour force. ‘Women power’ it seemed, had become one answer to the problem of how to secure business growth. For one group of companies in particular, women’s economic agency, both as consumers and as sellers became the basis of their business model: direct sales. In the mid-twentieth century, American companies like Tupperware and Avon made their way across the Atlantic, bringing with them new distribution methods, which relied upon the social networks, bonds, and domestic spaces of women’s lives. In so doing, they promised economic independence and flexible working conditions suited specifically to women and other economically marginalised groups in the form of the self-employed sales representative.

Tupperware advertisement featuring a Joe Steinmetz photograph, c.1958, State Archives and Library of Florida, Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250.

Over the coming year, I’m going to be using the archives of companies like Avon, newspaper reports covering the direct sales industry, and oral history interviews to find out more about why women chose to take the leap and ‘set up shop’, and what life was like when they did. Oral history methods are an established part of contemporary historical practice and can be an excellent way of hearing the perspectives of people whose voices don’t always end up recorded in institutional records. By talking to women about their experiences of self-employment, I hope to understand how practices like working from home, subcontracting, and the dream of working for oneself became so central to our society. These women experienced both the liberating potential of new post-war business practices as well as trajectories that involved being pushed into low-skilled, part-time, precarious work.

As part of this project, I’m lucky enough to be working with Bristol Special Collections to store the oral history stories I’ll be collecting. I’m also going to be working with a local filmmaking company, Black Bark Films, to make a short documentary film about what it has meant to work for yourself as a woman over the past 70 years. Through workshops with local charities and policy makers, along with a film launch I am also hoping to help shape the ways we think about and support women’s entrepreneurship in Bristol today.

Avon Outlook, Campaign 5, Box 103, Campaign Mailings 1969 (Accession 2155), Hagley Museum & Library, Wilmington, DE 19807. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

To learn more about the project you can hear me talking about it with the Hagley Museum and Archive where the Avon Company archives are held. This will be available from the 15th April.

Interested in being involved? 

If you are a woman who was self-employed at any time during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (whether as a direct sales rep, a franchisee, a freelancer, or running your own business etc.) I’d love to hear from you. If you’d consider recording your memories as part of this research project, please get in touch with me at amy.edwards@bristol.ac.uk.

Dr Amy Edwards is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History with research interests in the culture that surrounds business, finance, and capitalism in contemporary societies. To find out more about Amy’s research, her first book Are We Rich Yet, or ‘The Secret of my Success’ project, please contact amy.edwards@bristol.ac.uk.