woman in gym clothes pressing out a pill from a package

Doctoral project: Women’s fitness doping

The project focuses on women’s meaning making of doping and doping use, in a gym and fitness context. More precisely, the project aims to seek an understanding of women's doping trajectories, i.e. their paths to and from doping, and how the use is understood in relation to body, gender and health, among other things.

Project information

Doctoral student
Ellen Sverkersson
Supervisors
Jesper Andreasson and Torun Elsrud, Linnaeus University; Thomas Johansson, University of Gothenburg
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University, Prodis
Financier
Forte
Timetable
3 Sept 2018–June 2025
Subject
Social work (Department of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences)

More about the project

This project is part of a bigger umbrella project called Pumping up the ego: Biographical studies on young people’s doping trajectories. For this particular study, qualitative measures such as interviews and online material are used, with the ambition to analyze women’s fitness doping practices.

The aim of the study is to gain increased understanding of the meaning of doping in fitness culture by analyzing women's doping trajectories and how they legitimize and negotiate gender, health and body in relation to their drug use practice.

The project is part of the research in the Health, Gender and Embodiment and Ethnographic Forum research groups.