Fabiana Turelli

Dr. Fabiana Turelli is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba. She has worked professionally as a physical educator, a pedagogical coordinator, and a lecturer in Brazil. During her doctoral work in Spain, she spent eight months at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, working with Professor David Kirk, and eight months in Italy, with the Associazione Leib and Università di Bologna. Her PhD was mainly a study of the women’s Spanish Olympic karate squad exploring how they were building their embodied subjectivity for the unique, to date, participation of karate in the Olympic Games (Tokyo 2020). Her postdoctoral study carried out in Australia searched for ways to bring theory into practice in a struggle against intersectional social issues.

Dr. Turelli’s research line is first and foremost critical, combining concepts of critical theory produced by the Frankfurt School, and its expansion, particularly as it is elaborated in the North American context, supported by critical feminism. She also dialogues with the sociology of sport and Anglophone proposals for critical pedagogies, completing the circle in which her research is informed by studies of intersectionality theory, applied as intersectional thinking, practice, methodologies, and positionalities.

Dr. Turelli looks for connections between theory and practice, especially in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) matters, focuses on qualitative research, mainly ethnographic, seeking to adapt and conciliate this method with collaborative-work, in the manner of participatory action research. The lived experiences are highly relevant in her perspective, as much as the positions adopted by those who research, supported by deep reflexivity.

By being herself a martial arts and combat sports (MACS) practitioner for several years, she advocates for the potential of MACS to holistically empower people, mainly girls and women and so-called minority groups, at the same time that she advocates for the transformation of often hostile combative environments in order to avoid disempowering embodied experiences. Her approach seeks to challenge and disrupt traditional established structures, in sport and in society, proposing not the replacement of an old normative order by a new dominant order just changing the hands that hold power and domination. Instead, she proposes a permanent and fluid reconstruction, where no post is unquestionable and perpetual, change means opportunity, and reflexivity and criticality are fundamental.

Learn more about Dr. Turelli’s Fighting for Sustainable Empowerment (FSE) Project here!

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