Short pre‐conference report: Think Tank for critical social psychology of sport and exercise

On 9 June 2010, seven enthusiastic critical scholars gathered in a suite at the El Conquistador Hilton in Tucson, Arizona, for a day-long conversation about the challenges of doing interdisciplinary, critical and methodologically novel research in sport and exercise psychology. Vikki Krane and Diane Whaley organised the Think Tank. Initially, invitations were sent to about 20 scholars doing this type of research. All of the people invited to the Think Tank engage in cutting-edge research that often addresses novel topics, methods or presentation styles within sport and exercise psychology. While everyone responded noting their interest in, and support for, the Think Tank, travel schedules and reduced travel budgets impeded the ability of many to attend. Heather Barber (University of New Hampshire), Shannon Baird (University of Iowa), Deb Kendzierski (Villanova University), Vikki Krane (Bowling Green State University), Kerry McGannon (University of Iowa), Brett Smith (Loughborough University) and Diane Whaley (University of Virginia) were in attendance. Although we had an agenda, conversation tended to meander, zigzag and crisscross various themes and topics. Everyone was quite passionate and eager to share ideas, challenges, potential solutions and support for one another. We began with an overview of the rationale for why Vikki and Diane invited everyone to the Think Tank: our goal was for the Think Tank to be a forum in which we can support each other, consider potential collaborations, discuss research in progress and constructively approach the challenges we face. Vikki initiated conversation by telling her story, emphasising the feeling of being ‘academically homeless’ as an interdisciplinary researcher. Others in the group, also skirting the boundaries of multiple disciplines, were at times finding it hard to situate their work within sport and exercise psychology. As such, conversation focused on the challenges we face, such as finding accommodating publishing outlets, page limits that do not consider our need to write for multiple audiences within a single paper, having adequate formats for presenting our work at conferences and feeling that we tend to ‘preach to the choir’ in presentations advocating change or employing critical approaches. We spent four hours before lunch addressing these issues. Perhaps most notable was the different perspectives brought to the conversation; across us, our research included postmodern, post-structural, queer and feminist epistemologies; community engagement; and quantitative and qualitative methods. Discussion