Elite female cricketers' uses and perceptions of media (in)visibility: A case study on the everyday and the 2020 T20 World Cup

This study focuses on the relationship between sport, gender and social media and aims to advance current debates regarding women's sports and how elite athletes use and respond to social media. Ongoing access to the England Women's cricket team through the ECB performance centre at Loughborough University provides an unrivalled and original opportunity to make sense of the way professional athletes use social media & respond to comments made by others.
The 2020 Cricket World Cup (CWC) hosted in Australia will be used as a case study as it represents a unique period when the media will extensively be discussing women`s sport, subsequently capturing a historical moment in women's sport and providing a key moment to collect data in the field as it is generated by athletes, support staff, journalists and fans.
As a result, I am to investigate why people are using and responding to media by using my excellent networks to conduct interviews with key stakeholders; players, fans and the media during the event itself. Using my insider access to this media event, I will be able to collect a wealth of data on all aspects of the CWC at the tournament which provides real-time insight rather than interviewing post-tournament where the reliance on memory and access to fans could be difficult.
I plan to collect this data in person at the tournament in Australia travelling to the matches interviewing the stakeholders whilst capturing the experience with my own fieldnotes. I will be able to see how the media and fans engage with athletes during the competition at the live matches whilst also being able to see, and record, the online exchanges. It will be a unique opportunity to talk to fans and athletes about the role of digital media during the tournament which I would not be able to achieve without being at the tournament.
Plus, while scholarship on mega sporting events has grown over the last two decades, many of these studies focus on the Olympics or men's tournaments with few examining a global women's tournament. Furthermore, there has been relatively little work conducted from 'inside the event' therefore my attendance will provide a unique insight into the ways in which a range of participants, especially elite athletes, support staff and fans engage with and (re)present their activities at such an event. This overseas fieldwork element will allow my work to go beyond the standard work on media representations that is routinely produced and reproduced by media and communications scholars.
On return to Loughborough University I will analyse this data collected from the tournament in Australia but I will also reflect on the tournament and look more extensively at the online interactions of athletes and fans during the tournament period employing CDA to analyse social media profiles and interactions with online users. It will provide an opportunity to examine how athletes present their online 'self' and their athletic achievements as well as how such achievements are perceived and discussed by fans and media audiences.
This mixed method approach aims to provide a rounded understanding of how elite athletes negotiate their identity in the digital era whilst understanding any wider pressures, and seeks to answer the following research questions:
1) How do professional female athletes use social media to present themselves in sport?
2) What impact does social media debates have on the attitudes and experiences of professional female athletes?
3) How do online users understand and respond to female athletic identity, representations and success?
4) How do athletes perceive social media during major tournaments versus day-to-day media use?
5) How do fans engage with digital media during major tournaments?
For this study I will primarily focus on Instagram & Twitter as 2 of the most popular social networking platforms whilst using fieldwork from Australia CWC to understand how both fans and athletes engage with the digital era.