Selling yourself as an endurance athlete: Labour, agency, and negotiating wellbeing amongst networks of governance

Athlete welfare and mental health has received increased attention over recent years, as digital media has expanded possibilities for commercialisation and professionalisation for sports and athletes.

Over recent years, endurance sports (e.g. cycling, triathlon, and long-distance running) have sought to leverage these changes in the mediasphere.

While changes in the media space have garnered cross-disciplinary academic attention, little emphasis has been given to subjective experiences of these shifts and their relation to athletes' agential capacities and negotiations of wellbeing.

Thus, this research proposes to examine how professional endurance athletes are experiencing these changes, how it factors into their everyday experience, and most specifically, whether expanding domains of athletic labour are intensifying sporting systems of governance, or increasing athlete agency.

Utilising hybrid ethnography and semi-structured interviews, this research will explore how social media shapes everyday lives of endurance athletes, and provide nuanced understandings of emergent tensions and negotiations participants experience regarding their welfare.

Hybrid ethnography will enable 'offline' multi-sited fieldwork in conjunction with online observation, encapsulating the blurring of these settings and subjectivities, and how labour factors into these spaces.

Semi-structured interviews will support fieldwork, providing more developed, subjective understandings of how participants experience digital spaces, labour, and their interaction with offline-settings, and how they negotiate, manage, or advocate for their welfare in this context.

As online and offline contexts are increasingly enmeshed, this research will provide insights into how these labour contexts are / ESRC NINE DTP Postgraduate Studentship Nomination Form / Page 3 of 15 influenced by governance, agency, and how this impacts negotiations of wellbeing.