Making waves: knowledge production in sport, health and physical education

This paper emerges from a keynote delivered by the lead author of this paper at an international conference and evolves into a collaborative, critical dialogue with two other scholars, all committed to reimagining knowledge production in sport, health and physical education (SHPE). Central to our narrative inquiry is the metaphor of waves, which we reclaim to signal how knowledge production itself becomes a generative force of connection and transformation. Underpinning this work are deeper questions: How do we make waves? Do we ride the waves of others? Can we create waves that invite others to join us? These inquiries guide our reflections and set the stage for the personal and scholarly trajectories that shape our collaboration in this paper. Our work centres on our lived experiences of navigating multiple linguistic, socio-political and cultural contexts, revealing how these experiences shape distinct epistemologies that challenge dominant knowledge frameworks. The three authors view waves as multifaceted. The first experiences waves as liminal, enabling co-constructed rhythms that challenge hierarchies and foreground marginalised voices. The second understands waves as fluid and emergent, opening spaces for shared becoming and pedagogical freedom. The third frames waves as disruptive and politically charged, aiming to unsettle injustice and create transformative change. Together, they portray waves as dynamic forces capable of reshaping pedagogy, research and social relations. For the first and third authors, experiences of migration further complicate their positionalities, embedding their identities within transnational and diasporic trajectories. Our dialogues beneath the waves involved ongoing negotiation of identity and knowledge production, critically interrogating in/exclusion, privilege and resistance within complex academic landscapes. This paper invites scholars to engage with the productive tensions of uncertainty and to pursue collaborative, situated and reflexive research practices that foster more pluralistic and epistemically just research in SHPE.