Marie Loka Øydna

• Øydna, Marie Loka; Nielsen, Jens Christian; Saarinen, Milla Saara Anneli & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2026). ‘I would have studied while I showered’: A Foucauldian reading of how young student-athletes regulate their free time. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. ISSN 1012-6902. doi: 10.1177/10126902261426777. Full text in Research Archive
• Øydna, Marie Loka; Saarinen, Milla; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2025). “You can definitely tell she's truly committed”: student-athletes’ discursive construction of athletic commitment during transitions in secondary school. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. 7. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1658234. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this paper, we present how two female and one male student-athlete discursively construct and make sense of the “committed athlete”, highlighting key shifts across transitions between school levels and high-performance sport environments. Applying a Foucauldian perspective on power/ knowledge and vignettes from follow-up interviews, this paper highlights the relational nature of commitment, showing how it is shaped by broader discourses and institutional structures. Our analysis shows that a discourse of athletic performance investment dominates these transitions, yet the student-athletes also negotiate less instrumentalised constructions of the committed athlete as someone with internal love for the activity itself. However, as they move into upper secondary school programmes and more professionalised club environments, they are faced with fewer possibilities to enact alternative meanings of commitment. We argue that student-athletes positioned as talented are better able to benefit from holistic development initiatives within the talent development system, while those outside these hierarchies face limited possibilities to negotiate alternative forms of commitment. This analysis invites a critical rethinking of how dual career pathways might expand the discursive possibilities for what it means to be a committed athlete.

• Øydna, Marie Loka; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2024). Power, discourse, and practice: exploring athlete development as an educational discursive practice in a Norwegian lower secondary sports school. Sport, Education and Society. ISSN 1357-3322. doi: 10.1080/13573322.2024.2387799. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Norwegian lower secondary sports schools offer athlete development programmes that have a dual focus, both on the sports development and the education of student-athletes. Critical analysis of these programmes is vital given that such offerings are shaped by multiple power relations that have both positive and problematic consequences. This qualitative study set within the context of a Norwegian lower secondary sports school seeks to offer novel insights related to how policy and coaching practices for athlete development are informed by broader discourses within a school setting. The study has two main objectives: (a) to explore the discourses that school coaches draw on in their construction of the ‘ideal’ student-athlete, and (b) to investigate the disciplinary potential of the individual-oriented practices utilised to regulate and enforce student-athletes’ adherence to the requisite norms. We have adopted a Foucauldian-inspired theoretical framework to examine the sociocultural construction of particular ‘types’ of student-athletes. The sports programme, we argue, seeks to educate responsible student-athletes who are capable of making rational decisions about their individual training and healthcare. However, this individualised responsibility can be a problematic ideal because it constitutes a form of institutional governance achieved through self-governance. As such, in a school setting, it operates as a way both to encourage and condition the ways in which student-athletes can develop and adapt in creative, meaningful, and appropriate ways.

• Øydna, Marie Loka & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2022). Youth athlete learning and the dynamics of social performance in Norwegian elite handball. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. ISSN 1012-6902. doi: 10.1177/10126902221140844. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study examines how the social interactions of youth handball players are entangled with the ideals, beliefs and norms associated with youth athlete learning in Norwegian handball and communicated through coaching practice. This qualitative study uses Goffman's interactional sociological lens to explore how players strategically manage their interactions with peers and coaches by balancing the risks of overuse and injury with the need to be seen as promising, committed players. Our data collection was based on four focus group interviews and five individual interviews with 24 female youth handball players. The athletes reported that they conformed with the social rules and expectations of acceptable behaviour in handball because they wished to avoid being discredited in the eyes of their peers and coaches. Additionally, they engaged with these expectations through self-censorship and behavioural caution, because doing so allowed them to sustain their identity as promising athletes within the current framework of athlete development. They also feared being perceived as less committed to their development. The findings highlight how the normative expectations of youth athletes affect their sense of agency and control, the behaviours they engage in, and their understandings of what it means to be a good athlete. An understanding of how athletes perform socially in ways that facilitate opportunities for ongoing development will help to facilitate more productive, ethical and meaningful practice and pedagogies.

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• Øydna, Marie Loka; Nielsen, Jens Christian; Saarinen, Milla Saara Anneli & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2026). On the problems of athlete choice: rethinking health care for young student-athletes. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Amid the accelerating professionalisation of talent development, debates surrounding the demands faced by young athletes have increasingly emphasised that they must learn to make “good choices” as a core educational outcome on the pathway to elite sport. However, rather than leading to compliance, expectations to prioritise long-term goals and health frequently generate experiences of confusion, indignation, and defiance. What remains underexamined in these matters is how multiple, and often conflicting, forms of knowledges intersect to delimit what counts as legitimate choice – and who ultimately bears responsibility when things go wrong. We draw on fieldwork-based empirical stories from lower secondary schools, focusing on health-related dilemmas faced by young student-athletes. Through a Foucauldian analysis of power/knowledge governing athlete conduct, we set out to challenge the assumption that health-related decision-making is a straightforward matter of rational choice. Across these stories, student-athletes are taught to attune to bodily signals, such as fatigue and reduced capacity, as part of contemporary health care strategies in talent development. Yet knowing what constitutes a “good choice” (for example, reducing training intensity) does not necessarily translate into the improvements hoped for. Instead, when health care is centred on individual choice, student-athletes encounter a shifting set of tensions that require renegotiation: it requires breaking down structures and categories that define what a performing body is and how athletic commitment is recognised. From a coaching perspective, the crucial issue may not be that student-athletes fail to choose well, but that they are required to choose too much. We argue that meaningful intervention lies not in further individualising responsibility, but in developing the capacity to critically interrogate the competing versions of “right choice” circulating within talent development systems. This requires coaches to first identify the problematisations through which personal responsibility is positioned as the solution to structurally produced health dilemmas.

• Øydna, Marie Loka (2026). Fra resultat til utvikling: å arbeide med morgendagens talenter. Full text in Research Archive
• Øydna, Marie Loka; Saarinen, Milla Saara Anneli; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2025). Idrettselever sjonglerer mer enn de balanserer. Full text in Research Archive
• Øydna, Marie Loka; Saarinen, Milla Saara Anneli; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2025). The moral request for recovery: Rethinking coaching practices in lower secondary sports schools. Full text in Research Archive
• Øydna, Marie Loka; Saarinen, Milla Saara Anneli; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2025). Muligheter og utfordringer på idrettsungdomsskoler. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Idrettsungdomsskolene tiltrekker seg rekordmange elever, og trivselen blant elevene er høy. Likevel har kritiske diskusjoner reist spørsmål om helsebelastninger og tidlig profesjonalisering. Dette foredraget gir innsikt i ferske resultater fra en longitudinell studie om idrettselevers mentale helse, hverdag og identitetsutvikling. Gjennom en nyansert fremstilling utfordrer vi etablerte oppfatninger og åpner opp for en konstruktiv dialog om idrettsungdomsskolenes posisjon i ungdomsidretten.

• Øydna, Marie Loka; Nielsen, Jens Christian & Bjørndal, Christian Thue (2024). Athlete development in a Norwegian lower secondary sports school. Full text in Research Archive
• Øydna, Marie Loka (2026). Becoming an athlete, remaining other: A Foucauldian reading of athlete commitment in a lower secondary sports school in Norway. Norges idrettshøgskole. ISSN 9788250206519. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Teaching young athletes sound training routines and healthy lifestyle choices is widely recognised as a means of supporting their holistic development. This objective is institutionalised in lower secondary sports schools, which seek to apply scientific knowledge to the practical aims of combining long-term athlete development with formal education. In this thesis, I explore how athlete commitment is discursively produced through the intersections of educational practice, athlete development and health knowledge, institutional arrangements, and student-athletes’ self-governing practices. The outcome of the research is presented in three papers, each based on empirical data collected during fieldwork at a lower secondary sports school in Norway. Various qualitative methods were applied, including document analysis, observations, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews. The theoretical foundation for all three empirical studies is poststructuralism and Foucault’s concepts of discourse and power/knowledge. In the analysis, Foucauldian perspectives were integrated with methodological tools from reflexive thematic analysis and poststructural interview analysis. Paper 1 explores how lower secondary sports school coaches discursively construct the ‘ideal’ student-athlete in their talk and teaching practices. The analyses indicate that an overarching aim of the sports school programme is to teach young people how to take responsibility for their own development, while simultaneously learning to orient themselves towards their own goals and interests. Furthermore, the paper highlights the disciplinary potential of these teaching practices, which both enable and constrain young people’s understanding of sound training routines and healthy lifestyle choices. Paper 2 delves into how student-athletes understand and organise their free time. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge relations and focus-group interviews with 25 student-athletes, the analysis highlights three ways in which student-athletes balance expectations of succeeding simultaneously in sport and education: by using their time as effectively as possible, by reducing energy-demanding activities, or by invoking health as a justification for resistance and for taking breaks from an otherwise tightly packed schedule. Paper 3 examines how the discursive conditions under which student-athletes can position themselves as committed athletes change over time and across educational and athletic transitions. Further, the paper sheds light on the ‘identity work’ young studentathletes do to sustain legitimacy as committed athletes within the shifting power relations of their dual career environments. The analysis indicates that being part of a talent network reinforces student-athletes’ commitment identities but also extends the discursive terrain within which they can fashion subjectivities marked by patience, self-regulation, and a growth-orientation towards performance development. Overall, the empirical papers move beyond understanding commitment as the internal asset of an individual. Instead, this thesis provides insight into how athlete commitment is produced and sustained relationally between coaches, athletes, and through the tools, spaces, and discourses in which they are engaged. This insight forms the basis for a theoretically grounded rationale for rethinking holistic talent development as an integration of specific technologies of knowledge, power, and the self.

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