Paul Bowell

Paul is a PhD candidate within the Sports Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology. Paul’s research project seeks to understand how women Australian Rules footballers’ affectively experience digital self-tracking, and what impacts these interactions have on the player’s construction of selfhood, identity-making and body as athletes. With these insights he aims to develop a framework that empowers women footballers to maximise their performance through digital self-tracking, while promoting positive self-image and women athletes’ identity.

In 2022 Paul won the three-minute thesis award for the Sports Management Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Paul obtained a Bachelor of Arts with Honours specialising in sociology from The Australian National University. Paul’s Honours project, in which he achieved First-Class Honours, investigated the compliance processes of employees who were digitally self-tracked in their workplace. As an undergraduate Paul was awarded a New Colombo Plan scholarship that allowed him to participate in an ethnographic field school in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). During the ethnographic field school in PNG Paul conducted fieldwork activities including interviews, survey taking, and social and participant observations focused on the social restrictions of cash cropping. Paul has also worked at Deakin and La Trobe Universities lecturing and tutoring first and second year undergraduate sociology and sports management units.