Featured awardee: Madelaine Adelman

T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics

As a cultural anthropologist and law scholar, Madelaine Adelman, a professor of justice and social inquiry at ASU, knew sport had a potent role in shaping cultures in societies. But it wasn’t until a wave of bills that aimed to legislate sport participation for transgender youths flooded the U.S. this spring that Adelman set her sights on a project focused in this area.

Weaving her cultural scholarship with the political climate, Adelman set out to craft a storytelling toolkit using grant money from the Global Sport Institute. After working with ASU’s institutional review board to craft an ethical process for interviewing at-risk young people, Adelman and her team reached out to a diverse mix of high-school aged trans athletes across Arizona to hear their stories.

“We want to incorporate storytelling and be able to provide the perspective of youth and their experiences because it’s all of us sort of arguing and talking about it,” said Isaac Akapnitis, a postdoctoral student at the School of Social Work who is assisting Adelman. “We want to always make sure that those that are impacted by it the most have the voice to be able to tell their stories.”

More specifically, the project seeks to contextualize the experiences of gender nonconforming youth who have been affected by these bills not only by broadly disseminating their stories but also by using the experience of storytelling itself as a way for these young people to understand themselves and for society to better understand their lives. Adelman’s team will also interview parents, educators and coaches who interact with gender nonconforming athletes day-to-day to get the full scope of what has become a hotly-contested system of athletic participation.

“So many people are interested in collecting stories and circulating them and seeing whether they can change minds,” Adelman said, “but what is it like to actually be the person telling a story?” Half the subjects will put their stories together themselves, while half will be guided by the team. By the end of the upcoming school year, these stories will be circulated on social media and other digital channels to inform interested audiences everywhere. The American public is largely split on transgender issues within and outside of sport, and storytelling remains a powerful way to inform and discover new perspectives.