Each month the SDSC research group interviews one of its own researchers. The interviewee then becomes Researcher of the Month (RM), taking the reins of the SDSC website, blog and Twitter account. Our July RM, Carla Nascimento Luguetti, lecturer and researcher at Victoria University, focuses on sports pedagogy and social justice.
What is your current position and background?
I am a lecturer in health and physical education (PE) in the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University (VU), Melbourne.
I completed a PhD at the University of Sao Paulo in 2014. My PhD explored critical pedagogy and feminist studies in order to co-create a sports program that better addressed youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds. In that time, I was as a visiting researcher for six months at University of Bedfordshire, UK, under the supervision of Professor David Kirk.
In 2015–16, I did my post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Human Performance, Dance and Recreation at New Mexico State University, US, under the supervision of Professor Kimberly Oliver. I joined VU as a lecturer in 2018.
What are your research interests?
My overarching research and teaching focuses on topics of sports pedagogy and social justice. Over the past seven years I have focused on understanding activist approaches within sports contexts. The intent is to use sport as a vehicle for assisting youth to become critically aware of their communities’ social issues.
Since the beginning of this year, I have been studying and researching the importance of care and love in activist approaches. I am drawing specifically on Paulo Freire’s concept of love to explore a Pedagogy of Love in PE and sports contexts. It is a pedagogy based on dialogue, solidarity, hope, and imagination. Love emerged in my research when I engaged myself in a two-year participatory action research project with kids and pre-service teachers from socially vulnerable areas in Brazil.
Being in Australia offered me a possibility to explore a Pedagogy of Love in a different setting. As a research group, we are developing a project aimed to understand refugee settlement in and through sports in Victoria. I would like to explore a Pedagogy of Love with young people with refugee backgrounds. I also want to better understand the intersection between ethnicity, social class, sexuality, gender, and language.
Regarding my professional learning, I want to keep studying the challenges teachers face in order to learn an activist approach. I believe that teachers don’t have to come from a disempowered position to be able to deliver this kind of pedagogy. However, it requires them to examine their own values and assumptions about working with kids who are different from them, part of this is recognizing their own privileges. It is necessary for teachers to be humble enough to re-think themselves. It is a process that requires reflexivity in order to develop awareness of micro-oppressions so that micro-transformations can take place.
What does sport mean to you? Has your understanding of sport and your relationship with sport changed over time?
I see sport as a socio-cultural phenomenon with multiple meanings. Sport was fundamentally critical in my personal life. I played soccer (futsal) for more than eight years in my teens; I always trained with the same coach: Petin. Petin was the most upstanding person I have met in my life. Values such as justice, honesty, and caring were always present in our training sessions and games. In the sports context, I have learned the importance of these values in a leader – this has helped me in my life. So, sports created a space for me to see other opportunities in my life.
From my experience a lot of questions emerged, leading me to pursue my PhD. In my PhD, I studied how sports could be a vehicle for assisting youth in becoming critical analysts of their communities and in developing strategies to manage the risks they face by looking for alternatives beyond their current situations.
Currently, I still play futsal in Australia. It is a space in which I feel like home.
What is your ultimate dream job?
My ultimate dream job is one where I can balance research, teaching, and service and these can be understood as indissociable parts. For example, I love researching my own teaching.
What books or authors greatly influenced your work?
The big influence on my work is Paulo Freire. It took me while to understand it! When I arrived in Australia, I started to read books in our research reading group. I accessed authors I was not familiar with (e.g. White Nationby Ghassan Hage and Desi Hoop Dreamsby Stanley Thangaraj). I lost myself after reading these books, because it challenged my beliefs and how I see the world. So, I re-read Paulo Freire’s books with the aim to re-encounter myself again. I read Teachers as Cultural Workers, Pedagogy of Hope, Pedagogy of Solidarity, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (all by Freire).
I was also influenced by Professor Kim Oliver. She has many years of experience and has written extensively on activist approaches. Her work is the base of my work. I learned so much from her line of research. David Kirk also influenced my work. Physical education Futuresand his new book Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Educationare my favorite ones.
Nowadays, I am engaging in Black feminist and Chicana feminists’ literature. Chicana feminism is socio-political movement in the US that analyses the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational and economical intersections of Mexican-American women that identify at Chicana. But I have to say that there is really no simple definition for this. I am reading and re-reading powerful books such as The Dream-keepers by Gloria Ladson-Billings, Subtractive Schoolingby Angela Valenzuela and Borderlands/La Fronteraby Gloria Anzaldúa. I like how they argued that love/care should not be colour blind or power blind and that marginalized populations understand caring within their socio-cultural context.
What is it like to work in the same academic field as your partner?
It is a challenge to work in the same field as my partner. To be honest, I would prefer us to be in different areas. On the one hand, we share a lot of ideas at home and sometimes we write together. On the other hand, we struggle to divide personal and academic life. Most of it is my fault, because I am always working!
