Sports scholars

Sara Karlén is a PhD student at the Department of Sports Sciences, Malmö University. Her dissertation project studies football supporters and the Swedish supporter culture with a focus on the visual choreographies, known as tifos, that supporters create. In the past, she has studied sports audiences during the corona pandemic with a focus on football supporters, as well as conflicts between fans and police in the Swedish football landscape. Sara has an educational background in sociology and gender studies.

Susanna Geidne is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Science and an Associate professor in Public Health with focus on Health promotion at the Division of Sport Science at Örebro University. She focuses on practice-based health promotion research with sports (in a broad sense) as an arena. This includes methodologically diverse research on for example health promoting sports clubs (HPSC).

Antti Laine works as a Senior researcher and lecturer in sport sociology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests focus mainly on sport media, private sport sector (e.g. ice hockey and fitness) and sport as a societal phenomenon. Dr Laine has published numerous articles and acted as an editor in academic publications.

John T. Wendt serves as a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ethics and Business Law at the University of St Thomas.  He holds a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts, Summa Cum Laude from the University of Minnesota and a Juris Doctorate from William Mitchell College of Law.  His research focuses on sports law, risk management, and the use of performance enhancing drugs.  He is also a member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Lausanne, Switzerland).

Magnus Ferry is a Senior Lecturer and Associate professor at the Department of Education at Umeå university. He has a PhD in Sport Science with a dissertation focusing on the development of School Sports in Sweden, and the pupils and teachers involved. In his research he is interested in the socialisation processes through which individuals are formed, and the changes in social, cultural, and historical circumstances in which these processes are embedded.

Aurélien Daudi is a Ph.D. student at Malmö University. The subject of his research is the thriving domain of social media, particularly the digital culture surrounding fitness which, through the advent of social media, has grown immensely in popularity and appeal, recruiting into its midst young people from all over the world. He posits a dialectical synergy between fitness as a social practice and the governing values at the heart of social media.

Susanne Ravn is an Associate professor and Head of ‘Movement, Culture and Society’, a research unit at the University of Southern Denmark. In her research, she focuses on phenomenological approaches to skilled movement in dance practice. She is the author of several books in Danish and English and has published her research in journals focusing on phenomenology, qualitative research methods in sport, exercise and health, dance research and sociological analysis of embodied experiences.

Anna Qvarfordt is a senior lecturer in Sports Science at the University of Gävle. She has a PhD in Sport Science and in her dissertation she analyses the legitimacy of global anti-doping policy from the perspective of elite athletes. Anna is also involved in research on fitness doping where young people's perceptions of body image, health, exercise and doping means are studied.

Mads Skauge is a PhD candidate in sociology at Nord University (Bodø). His doctoral thesis deals with social inequality in Norwegian youth participation and activity in organized sports and at commercial gyms. His research interests and fields of expertise are mainly within sports sociology, social inequality, youth, sports, fitness, public health, sports politics, e-sports, talent selection, football and quantitative methods.

Jörg Krieger is a German sport historian, working as Assistant Professor for Sport and Social Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. In his research, he explores the policies and attitudes of sport organizations and their leaders in their attempts to combat challenging issues such as doping and corruption. Jörg’s current research focus is on the socio-political history of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).