Rebecca Olive
Rebecca is a feminist cultural studies researcher with a focus on how recreational lifestyle sports and leisure activities shape people’s relationships to nature. Taking an approach that centres on everyday experiences, encounters and activations that lifestyle sport and leisure activities facilitate allows a focus on complex ecological and cultural relationships. She began an RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship in 2022, which builds on an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2022).
With a background in ocean sports of swimming, surfing and sailing, Rebecca has focused on how participation encourages people to take better care of coasts and oceans. In this way, her work is about how sport can be beneficial for the health of ecologies, just as healthy ecologies are beneficial to human health. Key case studies have included: localism and the politics of belonging and access; living with sharks; and immersion in water pollution, such as chemicals and micro-plastics.
Rebecca’s work with RMIT will focus on sport and leisure in urban bodies of water including oceans, estuaries and rivers, and will focus on intersection issues of gender, health, pollution, pleasure, and safety.