Navigating race and gender in fitness spaces : exploring perspectives of racialized women in aerial dance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research project explored whether racialized women feel safe and included in alternative fitness spaces, specifically in aerial dance. Traditional fitness environments such as gyms and dance spaces tend to be white and exclusionary to racialized women (Cardoza, 2019). Building on research showing that artistic movements such as dance, including aerial dance, is a popular activity among women (Kosma & Buchanan, 2018), this study explores the appeal of aerial dance for racialized women. Despite its popularity (Ward, 2019), aerial dance remains an under-researched arena of both bodily and movement discourses. This study involved 12 in-depth semi structured interviews via Zoom with women of color who practice aerial dance in Canada. It was guided by the following research questions:1) What are the experiences of women of color in aerial dance spaces? 2a) In what ways are aerial dance spaces empowering and inclusive for women of color? 2b) In what ways are aerial dance spaces constraining and exclusionary for women of color? 3) How can aerial dance spaces specifically and physical activity spaces in general be transformed into more inclusive and empowering spaces for women of color? Using thematic analysis, the research study found that aerial dance spaces served a dual nature, presenting both barriers to, as well as fostering opportunities for inclusion and belonging for women of color. Several recommendations emerged from this study such as developing programs and policies for marginalized communities, targeted outreach, and reducing financial barriers to address the diverse challenges faced by marginalized communities in accessing and participating in physical activities. This study makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on gender and race in dance, as well as fills an identified gap in the research on women of color in aerial dance. Developing a greater understanding of what makes for safe and empowering physical activity spaces may serve as an avenue for establishing safe and inclusive spaces for women of color to experience physical activity in diverse contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".