Tinkering through transition: on ‘doctoring’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy

Abstract

This article addresses the notion of ‘making it’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. In it, we draw on the tradition of material semiotics to reflect on our shared journeys from doctoral student to beginning scholar and beyond. By attuning ourselves to the relationality, materiality and precariousness of our experiences, we offer an answer to the question of what it takes to ‘make it’ as an early-career academic by advocating the practice of ‘making do’ or ‘doctoring.’ We develop this argument, first, by describing the narrative methods we used to conduct our inquiry and by explaining the material-semiotic ideas we used to explore the stories it generated. Then, we tell tales of our transitions from higher degree research student to early-career academic, focusing specifically on our ongoing, collective efforts to make do. In our discussion, we explore these narratives and attend to three features of our actions and activities as early-career academics; namely semiotic relationality, material heterogeneity and the precarious processes of heterogeneous engineering through which we sought to make a career in our field. We conclude by encouraging beginning scholars in physical education and sport pedagogy to become sensitive to these aspects of their own agency, and to experiment, experience and tinker together in ways that are attentive, inventive, caring and persistent.

Keywords:

• Material semiotics
• Tinkering
• Early-career Academic
• Physical education
• Sport pedagogy
• Doctoring
• Actor network theory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided generous and supportive feedback on this article. We are also grateful to the special issue’s guest editors for their patience and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Benjamin Williams http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8083-7876

Notes

1. We acknowledge that this word has pejorative connotations. Nevertheless, like Mol (2008), we seek to rehabilitate it as a means of describing an attentive, inventive and persistent mode of engaging in the world.

2. For a call to expand the theoretical repertoire of our field in a material-semiotic direction, see Tinning (2004).

3. Like many of the authors we’ve cited here, we’re using the term material semiotics to refer to actor network theory and its diaspora of intellectual successor projects.

4. For illustrative examples, see Mialet (2012), Michael (2004) and Nespor (2011).

5. For a canonical example, see Akrich (1993).

6. This name is fictional. We have anonymised all the institutions and departments discussed in the research. Our stories, written in the interest of constituting a particular kind of story (Sarup, 1996), emphasise ‘participating with’ rather than ‘describing for’ our colleagues and thus reflect our own experience but also a social experience of our workplaces.

7. See Mewburn (2011) for a discussion of the contribution that places and practices like these make to the successful enactment of an emerging scholarly self.