Previous Visiting Scholars

Project: The Foucauldian Governmentality of Self and Others: Cases of Homosexual Clergy During the Communist Period

I thank you for the wonderful time in the frame of my visiting scholar opportunity at the Department of Sociology,UCCS. Th was an opportunity for me to meet great researchers, and internationalize my view of the history of sexuality combined with Catholicism and the history of the Polish state. An article, "The Foucauldian Governmentality of Self and Others: Cases of Homosexual Clergy During the Communist Period" is a result of this stay. I hope that it will be published by the end of this year.

Now, I am delighted to announce, that my chapter "Anti-Gender Preaching on IKEA Intranet: Catholic Church as a Besieged Fortress (2019-2021)" in the book Established-Outsider Relations in Poland: Reconfiguring Elias and Scotson, edited by Marta Bucholc, has now been published in a volume in Palgrave Series on Norbert Elias. The ebook is available here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-49523-6. Moreover, my article "Against the Nudity in Art: Eliasian Reading of National Conservative Catholic Habitus" will be published in Open Access in the journal Open Theology in April or May this year. I am excited to share these works with you! I hope you find the book, article, and the contributions within them as engaging and thought-provoking, as the process was for me.

Project: Training and Pharmaceutical Usage of Elite Athletes
Funder: Fulbright Scholarship

Dr. Brissonneau’s research focused on the training and health regimes of elite athletes, especially their use of performance enhancing drugs (doping), in and around the “Olympic City”. This research was based on intensive interviewing of athletes, sports journalist, and other sport professionals. This visit also led to the publication of Doping in Elite Sports: Voices of French Sportspeople and Their Doctors, 1950s-2010 (Routledge, 2019) with Jeffrey Montez de Oca.

Project: Cross-National Comparison of Physical Education in the United States and China
Funder: Chinese Scholarship Council

Dr. Ran’s research engaged in a cross national study of elementary school physical education classes. Using her 9-year old son’s school as a research site in the United States, she focused on track and field meetings, PE, the playground settings and the physical activities at the school. She found significant differences in approaches to physical education in China and the United States.

Project: Heroic, Damaged, Homeless? Negotiated Perceptions of the Veteran Bodymind in UK and US Society: A Qualitative Cross-Cultural Study
Funder: British Psychological Society

Dr. Phillips’ research seeks to understand why individuals in US and UK society hold potentially contradictory perceptions of veterans and how perceptions compare cross-culturally. Of the fifty-eight semi-structured interviews, 29 US interviews were conducted during the visit. This research explores how US and UK public perceptions include both victimized and heroizing sentiments of veterans and how individuals from US and UK society justify their perceptions of veterans in comparable ways: war, deployment and violence are conceptualized as inhumane, barbarous and unhealthy with immediate links to combat-exposure. This justifies attributing damage to the veteran bodymind (Price, 2015). To understand the veteran’s willingness to risk exposure to violence, a constellation of inherent bodymind dispositions prior to service are associated to veterans (i.e. physically strong, morally-superior, cognitively-limited/naïve). This visit has led to the publication of the article, “Understanding the Victimization of US Army Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans in US Public” (2022) in the Journal of Military and Veterans Health co-authored with Dr. Heather Albanesi.

Project: A Cross Culture Research on Parental Involvement of Organized Youth Sport Between China and America
Funder: Chinese Scholarship Council

Dr. He’s research explored youth sport participation cross culturally to better understand how parents affect their children’s involvement from a sociological perspective. The specific objectives were to 1) explore why Chinese parents attach more importance to youth sport than ever before? 2) examine how Chinese parents affect their children’s participation in an organized sport program? 3) explore differences of parental ideologies in terms of youth sport participation between China and America. Additionally, during the visit Dr. HE published “Why the Chinese Olympics artistic gymnastics team suffered its worst performance at Rio 2016?” in International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching (2020) with Jeffrey Montez de Oca and Lei Zhang.