Vanier Graduate Scholarship for Danielle Peers

Graduate student Danielle Peers has been awarded the plum of Canadian graduate student awards, a prestigious Vanier Graduate Scholarship.

One of Canada's best-known and gutsiest young athletes Peers is one of 166 doctoral students in Canada, and one of just 12 at the University of Alberta, to receive the Government of Canada's award in its inaugural year. The new award has been touted widely as Canada's equivalent to the coveted Rhodes Scholarships. Recipients of the Vanier receive $50,000 per year for three years to fund their doctoral studies.

Peers is completing her master's degree and will use the award to fund her doctoral research project, Crossing up, crossing down, crossing out: theorizing challenges to the categories of sporting ability.

"I'm interested in the ways that humanity get divided into categories and kept separate," she explains, referring specifically to the clear-cut demarcation in society of what's considered able-bodied vs. disability sport and how athletes should compete.

Peers' interest stems from her experience as a high-performance athlete for over a decade.

As a national wheelchair basketball athlete, she won bronze at the Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004, a gold medal as part of Team Canada at the World Championships in 2006, where she was also named World's MVP and, in 2005, was also the first female athlete to be named to the American Men's All-Star team.

Peers' doctoral research will examine a dozen or so case studies, such as that of 400m athlete Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, whose quest to complete in the Olympic Games caused tremendous controversy as he fought to be included in a competition reserved for able-bodied athletes.

"In sport, athletes with easily categorized disabilities are separated out from able-bodied athletes, and are compelled to compete in segregated, disability-specific competitions where athletes are assumed to be less competent and are therefore granted less status, funding, media coverage and athletic opportunities than their 'able-bodied' peers," she says.

"My research will analyze the athletes' choices and sport policies that constituted the crossing (or attempted crossing); the press releases, media coverage and public debates that followed the crossing; and the decisions, policies and rules that resulted from the crossing.

"I want to look at what constitutes the crossing; what kinds of bodies are crossing; what policies or rules are being crossed; what are the reactions to that crossing in the media. Legally, often the crossing is resolved in lawsuits; what kinds of changes have been enacted - did it end up changing the policy? For example when Pistorius came closer to crossing (the boundary between able-bodied and disabled sport), the IAAF created a new rule banning the use of any equipment that included or mimicked wheels or springs. Similarly the South African Olympic Committee was bringing up a loophole in which an athlete's foot must be on the starting blocks."

In the end Pistorius did compete but this by no means threw Olympic competition open to athletes with disabilities. His participation was permitted on an individual basis. Another disabled athlete wanting to cross over would likely have to overcome the same obstacles to participation.

"I am also interested in looking at some of the exceptions and how people react to those exceptions," says Peers.

"It's a very interesting subject position from which to do this research because I've played disability sport as an able-bodied person and as a disabled person, and having a degenerative condition I've played at various degrees of disability at this point, " says Peers.

"I hope to expose the circumstances in which over-simplified sporting categories, and our stories about them can be disabling," she says, "and to open the conversation between athletes, academics, disability advocates and sport administrators about how to re-imagine and re-configure elite sport to better accommodate, encourage and celebrate a wider variety of athletes."

Peers is also exploring her experience of crossing societal and sporting divides in film. Her short film, "Gimp Boot Camp" explores what it's like to be someone who is sometimes read as able-bodied and sometimes as disabled and what happens when the boundary is crossed.

The film, which she made with Dr. Melisa Brittain, was the Official Selection of the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Toronto and Vancouver; aired in New York City at the disThis film festival, and received honourable mention at PictureThis, the International Disability Film Festival.

Her second film project, "And the Rest is Drag," about the drag king culture in Alberta, is in production.

More about Danielle Peers at her website at www.daniellepeers.com