Dr Trish Jackman: Flow Research Women in Sport and Beyond

Dr Trish Jackman is Associate Professor in Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Lincoln. She is also the current Chair of the Psychology Division in the Chartered Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (CASES). Trish is an active researcher, with some of her current projects focusing on healthy ageing and loneliness. Alongside her academic role, Trish is also a registered Sport and Exercise Psychologist and works with athletes, coaches, parents and support staff across a range of sports. Trish has a deep interest in women in sport research and practice. She is a member of the míde research consortium on the island of Ireland and led a scoping review of research about women in sport in Ireland, identifying key trends in the existing evidence base and offering recommendations for future research.      In this episode, Britta Sorensen speaks with Dr Trish Jackman, Associate Professor in Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Lincoln and Chair of the Psychology Division at CASES.  Trish traces her path from playing camogie in rural Waterford to an academic career built, more or less by chance, on a single undergraduate essay about optimal experience. That essay led her to the concept of flow, which became her master's dissertation, then her PhD at Lincoln, and eventually a body of work spanning two decades. She explains how her thinking on flow has changed over that time: away from a purely cognitive account of a single optimal state, toward something more embodied, more individual, and open to the idea that athletes can perform at their best even when the experience itself feels difficult.  The conversation ranges widely across her work. She describes building the Ageing and Physical Activity Network in Lincolnshire, a county whose rural geography and older-than-average population make physical activity a challenge worth taking seriously, and makes the case that enabling movement in later life is everyone's business rather than something confined to health and sport professionals. She discusses her research on the mental health of doctoral researchers, prompted partly by her own experience, and a large systematic review on loneliness in sport that found isolation can be produced by the culture and structure of a sporting environment rather than simply by being alone in it.  The second half turns to Ireland, where Trish is part of the MIDE Research consortium working to map and advance research on women and girls in sport across the island. She talks about the gap between what is published and what reaches coaches and communities, the cultural and linguistic context that shapes the work, and where she hopes it will be in five or ten years. The episode ends on running, which she took up after retiring from camogie and, on the reasoning that she was never going to be fast, began with an ultramarathon.    Links: https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/researchatlincoln/meetourexperts/trishjackman/  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trish-jackman-67456659/