Invisible Archives: Intersectional Epistemologies and the Construction of Knowledge in Physical Education and Sport

BackgroundThe history of sport and physical education is far from the neutral narrative suggested by its canonical records. Archives are not passive repositories; they are constructed, curated, and silenced by the same social and institutional logics that govern sporting practice and pedagogical theory. When examining who is documented, whose achievements are preserved, and which bodies are deemed worthy of historical memory, a persistent pattern emerges—one shaped by gender, cultural normativity, and institutional frameworks that dictate what counts as "performance" and who counts as a "legitimate athlete."This Research Topic is founded on a critical premise: the inclusion of women as subjects of historical study has not been sufficient to dismantle the androcentric biases structuring how that history is produced. While the last two decades have seen a significant expansion in research on female athletes, coaches, and the gendered history of physical education—including the experiences of disabled women in Paralympic contexts—a critical problem persists. The analytical frameworks, sources, and interpretive lenses employed often reproduce the very stereotypes they seek to challenge.The challenge, therefore, is not merely one of representation—of adding more women to the historical record—but of epistemology and methodology. We must understand how archives of sport and physical education are constructed, who decides what is preserved and what is discarded, and how the methodological construction of historiography itself shapes our understanding of the past. How are these archives recovered and reconstructed? How is what has been ignored or discarded made visible?In the current socio-cultural moment, the archive holds immense political power—in the broadest, most democratic sense of the term. This power is being amplified and reshaped by artificial intelligence, which now exploits, learns from, and feeds back its own versions of the archive, layering algorithmic biases on top of the biases already inscribed in its original codification. This raises urgent questions about whose histories are reproduced and whose remain silenced in the new digital epistemic order.We invite contributions that scrutinize how the historical and pedagogical construction of physical education and sport has contributed to the marginalization—or hyper-visibility—of certain bodies. Vast minorities, paradoxically, continue to be rendered invisible when individual cases or specific topics take precedence. It is precisely the archive that holds the potential to dismantle this noise, and this is what we aim to foreground.GoalWe invite contributions from history, sociology, education sciences, cultural studies, disability studies, gender studies, and the philosophy of physical education that interrogate—rather than merely describe—the relationship between archival construction, gender bias, and the pedagogical construction of the moving body. The aim is not to produce another survey of women's involvement in physical culture, but to analyze the methodological and political conditions under which historical knowledge is produced, to examine how archives can be reconstructed and reactivated, and to propose interdisciplinary tools capable of disrupting normative paradigms of performance, physical literacy, and historical visibility. Topic editors: Maria Eugenia García-Sottile, Laura Ruiz-Sanchis, Carolina Paioli Tavares Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84810/invisible-archives-intersectional-epistemologies-and-the-construction-of-knowledge-in-physical-education-and-sport