Graduate Student Focus: Monica Crawford, Ph.D. Candidate

What inspired you to pick your topic of research?

Well, for one, I’ve been obsessed with women’s sports ever since I scored my first soccer goal while playing on a youth parks and recreation team in my hometown. But now that I’m a bit older, I’ve come to realize that sport operates as a primary vehicle for making sense of the world around us. Most often we engage with sport through media, making media coverage and visibility of sport a key component of contemporary culture. 

Interestingly, in the past 5 years, media visibility of women’s sports has skyrocketed nationwide. As both a critical scholar and consumer of women’s sports media, this growth has inspired me to question what sustainable, quality women’s sports coverage might look like and how audiences might equitably access media coverage of their favorite teams, athletes, and leagues. Ultimately, these questions help me to understand the contemporary nature of the sports media landscape and address broader themes related to journalistic norms, gender representation and audience agency within ever-changing sociotechnical systems. This study in particular addresses the tension between audience agency and infrastructural constraints — a topic I have not been able to stop thinking about as of late.

What contribution do you hope your research makes to the field?

Broadly, in this piece and my current dissertation research, I hope to theorize how audiences come across and make sense of media content within a concurrently algorithmic, capitalistic and patriarchal media system. Through qualitative approaches, my goal is to center the voices of sports fans and audiences. Doing so (hopefully) provides an important complement to existing effects-based research on audiences’ media use. 

Specific to the subfield of sport communication, thousands of studies have analyzed the amount and style of women’s sports media coverage. But relatively little research has explored how audiences access or experience existing women’s sports media. I hope to add to the small body of work on women’s sports audiences and provide a starting point for future feminist sports media studies scholarship attuned to media use and sports fans.

What support did you receive from the School to be able to do this research?

I have been so grateful for the overwhelming support from the Hubbard School throughout my time here. Hubbard has provided me with an encouraging and supportive intellectual environment, and the faculty here have made me feel extremely welcome both as a human being and as a scholar. This study began as a class paper for Dr. Matt Carlson’s JOUR 8651: Mass Communication, Audiences, and Society. My time in this class deeply shaped my understanding of media audiences and has been key in my ensuing dissertation research. Relatedly, my co-advisors Dr. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and Dr. Dunja Antunovic (Kinesiology) have offered consistent mentorship as I’ve grown from a first year PhD student to a doctoral candidate. I will always be thankful for the hours I’ve spent in their offices and their willingness to listen to my rambles and worries over the years. Finally, funding from the Hubbard School has made living and researching in the Twin Cities — a major U.S. hub for women’s sports — possible. Hubbard’s financial support allowed me to compensate interview participants for the present study, travel to conferences to present my research, and dedicate my summers toward developing my individual research projects.