I am a professor in sport management and sociology of sport at Victoria University. Many of my childhood memories involve sport in one way or another: from playing street football (the round ball) and tennis in the Netherlands, and watching Studio Sport on Sunday evenings, to attending my first Feyenoord-Ajax game with my grandfather and my father. I have been playing club football since I was six years old, and today I play futsal in a team made up predominantly of migrants like me. I also continue to enjoy coaching kids in football.
Soon after I migrated to Australia in 2007, I began to study the lived experience of refugee-background young people in football, basketball, and other sports. I became a researcher, football coach, and casual mentor in one of Melbourne’s largest public housing estates, where a relatively large number of people from migrant and refugee backgrounds live. These experiences let me to publish my first scientific articles on the sport experiences of Somali Australians, as well as my book Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries.
The life stories of newly arrived migrants and refugee-background young people, and their experiences and achievements in sport and physical culture, continue to fascinate and inspire me. Extending my earlier research, Change Makers gives me the opportunity to not only document these experiences and achievements, but also to work together to make positive change happen in the communities we serve.
I am a lecturer and researcher in the sociology of sport at Victoria University. I am internationally recognised for my research on sport in contemporary Australian society. Through years of engagement with students I have developed a keen understanding of the issues of inclusion and exclusion across a variety of grass roots and elite sport settings.
Playing rugby in Japan in the mid 1990’s gave me my first personal experience of how sport could simultaneously include and exclude. Things that I had taken for granted in Australia became apparent playing in Japan. Cultural misunderstanding, language barriers, access to transportation, styles of play, and stereotypes all meant that the depth of my inclusion was often superficial.
I have an enormous passion for sport and have been involved in playing and coaching for the best part of 30 years. At the moment I coach my daughter’s soccer team and therefore engage regularly with the complexities of trying to make sport as inclusive as possible. I’m a big believer in the possibilities of sport to act as a vehicle for social inclusion, to create a place where people feel they belong, and to provide enjoyment and social opportunities. However, mindful of my time playing in Japan, for sport to be more inclusive for migrants and refugees requires those who are already in sport to recognise some of their taken for granted knowledge of these spaces. I’ve met so many amazing and generous people in sport, people who believe in equality and inclusion, and I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with them to help translate these beliefs into actions.
I am a lecturer and researcher in physical education at Victoria University. I migrated to Australia recently and sport has always been a part of my life. I started to play when I was eight years old on the streets in Brazil. We used to play a small-sided soccer game called ‘gol caixote’. The posts were made with flip flops, and the uneven terrain, houses and people passing by made the game even more fun. I grew up playing football and flying kites with friends who lived in favelas (slums in Brazil). I met so many good friends while playing football. I also learned so many values including teamwork, collaboration, and trust. My experience playing sport led me to complete a PhD at the University of Sao Paulo in 2014 during which time I explored critical pedagogy and feminist studies in order to co-create a sport program that better addressed youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds. I became passionate about how we can prepare coaches/teachers to deliver pedagogies aligned with the idea of social transformation. To learn more about it, I did my post-doctoral fellowship at New Mexico State University (US) in 2015– 16 after which I moved to Australia and joined VU as a lecturer in 2018. I have been using participatory methodologies to co-create spaces of social transformation across diverse context (e.g., nonprofit organisations, teacher education programmes and school context), countries (e.g., Brazil, United States and Australia) and with diverse populations (e.g., young people from socially vulnerable backgrounds, refugee-background young people, young women, and pre-service teachers). I believe Change Makers creates a space for me to keep trying to impact diverse people’s learning and their future participation in sport. However, this project is special because I am not alone; we are a group, a community that shares the same emancipatory interest. Collectively, we could create spaces for migrants and refugee-background people to name, critique, and negotiate barriers to participate in sport.
I am a senior lecturer and researcher in sport and social change at Victoria University and I am a lead researcher on the Change Makers project. I am a kiwi and in my youth I played, coached and managed many sports. I spent countless hours swimming, running and whacking balls. I loved sport and physical activity so much that I undertook a physical education degree at the University of Otago, and my love of sport then coincided with a love of learning and research. At university I was introduced to sociological thinking and these tools allowed me to see that sport experiences and opportunities were not the same for everyone, and that in many ways I had been very fortunate in my access to opportunities to play and love sport. Reflecting back, I realised that the players, coaches and administrators in the sports I played were mostly all from the same Pākehā background as me (particularly in cricket, swimming and athletics). However, I also became aware that I had tolerated a lot of ingrained sexism in sport – I had just taken for granted that my brothers and my male peers had even better experiences, more opportunities and greater rewards. These realizations turned into a quest to better understand and change sporting structures and culture – both in terms of gender and cultural diversity. In my job I work every day to use and translate my knowledge of inequality, discrimination and injustice to help try and make sport, physical education, exercise and physical activity experiences more accessible, safer and better experiences for all. I’m looking forward to working with you on this mission to help create more inclusive and supportive sporting climates in Melbourne’s West.
My Relationship with sports is different to most people. As a kid, I loved the social aspects of sports and was naturally good at it. However, that changed when I started noticing teachers and coaches taking fun out of sports and placing more importance on my skills and competitiveness. This resulted in me resisting to play sports and this changed my outlook on sports as a whole. I am excited to be part of the change makers project and looking forward to revisiting and unpacking the biases and the resistance I had as a kid and look at it from a different perspective. I am currently doing my master’s degree in criminology and Justice and relating that to the effects of inclusion and exclusion. I have worked in the community sector for the last 4 years delivering training and facilitation, as well as working as a policy and research officer. I am looking forward to being inspired by the change makers’ love for sports and rebuilding my relationship with sports.
In 2018, I took on a new role as Girls’ Program Manager at Glen Eira FC, after realising the Club wasn’t offering its girls anything close to the same opportunities as the boys in the Club. With 2 daughters and 2 sons who played for Glen Eira FC, and were having very different experiences, this wasn’t acceptable to me! Working alongside the inaugural Girls’ Technical Director, John Sugunananthan (a visionary coach and leader in girls and women’s football), we introduced a host of new programs (most of them free), established a leadership team, gathered sponsors, and created an elite pathway for girls in the Club, to match the elite boys’ pathway that had existed for nearly 10 years.
A year later our girls’ participation rate had increased by 40%, our social media was saturated with our new girls’ program, and we were off and away! Despite the enormous progress we have made, we still have a very long way to go in many areas before reaching the target of 50/50 – for example our Club’s Committee is severely lacking in its representation of girls and women.
Whilst I am a lawyer by background, I am passionate about advancing girls and women in football, and I was a lucky participant in FV’s inaugural Female Administrator Leadership Program in 2019. I was also grateful to receive a Change Our Game Scholarship from the Victorian Government, which will allow me to further my study in community sports management and leadership.
I have hopeful leadership aspirations for the future, and would especially like to see Club governance reformed and overhauled, to ensure equality in participation and experience in Clubs. I am thrilled that Australia is co-hosting the Women’s World Cup in 2023. What a time to be an Australian woman involved in the beautiful game! I doubt there will be a better opportunity to advance women and girls in football in Australia, and to reach the target of 50/50 participation. We have much to do on many fronts, but this is our time – oh the places we will go!