Holly Thorpe

Holly Alysha Thorpe is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Waikato, specialising in sports sociology.

Academic career

Thorpe was a competitive snowboarder. She completed a PhD titled Boarders, Babes and Bad-Asses: Theories of a Female Physical Youth Culture at the University of Waikato in 2007. Thorpe then joined the faculty of the university, rising to full professor in 2019. Her inaugural professorial lecture described how new sports like snowboarding came to be included in the Olympic Games. Her research covers gender, youth, extreme and action sports and how sport can contribute to development.

Thorpe is a principal investigator in the Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence. She has written five books and edited a further nine. Thorpe is a founding member of WHISPA, a High Performance Sport NZ working group on healthy women in sport.

Awards

In 2009 Thorpe was awarded a scholarship by the Leverhulme Trust to visit the University of Brighton, where she wrote a book about snowboarding culture.

Thorpe was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011 to visit Georgetown University to compare the extreme sport experiences of New Zealand and American children and youth. and a Leverhulme Fellowship. In 2018 she was awarded a Royal Society Early Career Research Excellence Award for Social Sciences, and in the same year was awarded Fellowship of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

Thorpe was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship in 2021, for research titled 'Reconceptualizing Wellbeing: Women, Sport and Communities of Belonging'. Her project explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, and their strategies for maintaining connection, wellbeing and physical health during the pandemic.

Selected works

• Holly Thorpe (December 2009). "Bourdieu, Feminism and Female Physical Culture: Gender Reflexivity and the Habitus-Field Complex". Sociology of Sport Journal. 26 (4): 491–516. doi:10.1123/SSJ.26.4.491. ISSN 0741-1235. Wikidata Q123411046.
• Holly Thorpe (May 2008). "Foucault, Technologies of Self, and the Media: Discourses of Femininity in Snowboarding Culture". Journal of Sport & Social Issues. 32 (2): 199–229. doi:10.1177/0193723508315206. ISSN 0193-7235. Wikidata Q123411051.
• Holly Thorpe; Belinda Wheaton (October 2011). "'Generation X Games', Action Sports and the Olympic Movement: Understanding the Cultural Politics of Incorporation". Sociology. 45 (5): 830–847. doi:10.1177/0038038511413427. ISSN 0038-0385. Wikidata Q123411054.
• Kim Toffoletti; Holly Thorpe (February 2018). "Female athletes' self-representation on social media: A feminist analysis of neoliberal marketing strategies in "economies of visibility"". Feminism & Psychology. 28 (1): 11–31. doi:10.1177/0959353517726705. ISSN 0959-3535. Wikidata Q123411005.
• Holly Thorpe; Nida Ahmad (18 June 2013). "Youth, action sports and political agency in the Middle East: Lessons from a grassroots parkour group in Gaza". International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 50 (6): 678–704. doi:10.1177/1012690213490521. ISSN 1012-6902. Wikidata Q123411058.
• Thorpe, Holly (27 October 2022). "New Zealand's slippery slopes: the uncertain future of snow sports in a climate emergency". Alaska Beacon. Retrieved 12 November 2023.