Each month the SDSC research group interviews one of its own researchers. The interviewee then becomes Researcher of the Month (RM), taking the reigns of the SDSC website, blog and Twitter account. Our February RM, Sarah Oxford, is a Lecturer in Sport Management at Victoria University. Sarah recently completed her PhD and received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Research Training: Research Degree Graduate.
What is your background and how has it influenced your research?
I consider myself a sociologist with anthropological leanings. My curiosities about words and ways of being began during my childhood. My story begins in a small, rural farming community located in the foothills of North Carolina (USA), where the residents are mainly white (Scots-Irish), politically conservative (Republican), Christian (Southern Baptist), working class and high school educated (78%). The community is small and a lot of families have been there since the American revolutionary war (1776). Everyone seemed to fall in line, but I had a lot of questions. I am extremely fortunate because my grandparents and parents were educators who encouraged me to read, travel and experience life in other cultures. I graduated from a liberal-feminist boarding school, a liberal arts university, and then worked in numerous places far from ‘home’. Before graduate school, I worked in the non-profit industry, particularly in community development and international development. I think my roots are an important part of my research lens. Not only have I been afforded numerous opportunities to contemplate my identity, boundaries and essentially to be a fish out of water (in a privileged way), but because of my experiences as an insider/outsider in multiple spaces I’ve learned to be a cultural translator.
What are your research interests?
I have a strong commitment to social justice and this includes listening to and promoting alternative narratives to everyday sociological issues. I’m drawn to black feminism and decolonial theory. I’m particularly interested in the social inclusion of women of color within feminism, and more broadly, within sport. For my MA and PhD, I researched gender relations within the Sport for Development and Peace movement. I’d like to bring my knowledge closer to home (West Melbourne) and work in sporting spaces with women from migrant and refugee backgrounds.
Ethnography in action! Sarah conducting fieldwork in Colombia in 2015.
What is your ultimate dream job?
It’s basically my current job without the bureaucracy and grading. In other words, I’d be a writer and a subsistence gardener. I’m working on it.
What does a non-neoliberal and non-monetary world look like to you?
What a question! This is an interview in itself and we’d need to define those terms in addition to capitalism and modernity to properly proceed. My thoughts immediately go to pre-modern social structures, but I may be lost in my imagination. I hope this world would involve a completely different set of measurements for success than what we currently have; and, that community cohesion over individual desires would be prioritized. There will always be fear mongering and greed, but I’d love to see systems that suppress the ego rather than placing it in the center. I’d very much appreciate if we could all slow down and introduce ourselves to our neighbors again. We’ll always have currency of sorts because we need each other to survive, but the definition of currency changes with technology and access to resources.
What books or authors greatly influenced your work?
When I was younger James Baldwin took me for a ride. He opened my world in his texts, making me feel uncomfortable and then having to reflect upon my discomfort. More recently, I love reading anything by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She’s amazing at building characters, weaving history into plot lines and encouraging the reader to empathize with situations that may be foreign or uncomfortable for them. In my writing, I work to humanize the people I have interviewed since their social positioning often means they are unheard and invisible. I look to authors like Baldwin and Adichie for guidance. Perhaps you intended for me to give you academics? My PhD substantially changed because of Isis Giraldo (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and Ramón Grosfoguel (University of California, Berkeley, USA). Their writing on decolonial thinking is exceptional. I’m also a super fan of Mara Viveros Vigolla (Universidad Nacional de Colombia). I’m always looking for academics who do not following the Rockstar path (e.g., not writing about Bourdieu, Marx, etc.), and who may be relegated to the sidelines of academia because of modernity-colonality.