Role
Dr. Gavin Weedon is an interpretive scholar whose research explores how work, leisure and cultural life are shaped by power, meaning-making, and world-historical forces. He seeks to produce expansive studies about a broad range of phenomena, including food and fitness, ecology and labour, platforms and media, health and disease, and youth and education.
His recent book is Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar (Coauthored with Samantha King, Queen’s University; published by Duke UP), which offers an interdisciplinary account of the forces that gave rise to today’s cultural obsession with protein.
Career overview
Gavin Weedon is Associate Professor in Sociology of Sport, Health and the Body in the Department of Sport Science. Gavin joined NTU in 2016 from the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he attained his PhD in Kinesiology (the art and science of the moving body). His doctoral studies at UBC comprised an interdisciplinary programme of political ecology, science and technology studies, cultural studies, and socio-cultural kinesiology. Before this he studied at Southampton Solent University (BA Hons) and Loughborough University (MSc), where his research focussed on elite youth sport, labour migration, and globalisation.
In 2019, Gavin received the Young Researcher Award from the European Society for the Sociology of Sport for his work on body cultures of the Anthropocene. In 2022, he became a Fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation to support his research on respiratory justice. In the same year, he was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research at NTU.
Alongside his role at NTU, Gavin is Adjunct Professor at Queen’s University, Canada, as well as a member of the Centre for Sport and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and serves on the editorial boards of the Sociology of Sport Journal and Leisure Studies.
Research areas
My research spans four main areas, each of which is grounded in an interpretive approach:
- Climate, nature, health and the outdoors
- Communications, journalism, media and technology
- Disease, identity and organisation power
- Young people, welfare and education
I am actively pursuing research in each of these areas, though in recent years I have focussed on two main projects. First, I have been working on understanding the human, animal and environmental issues arising from the contemporary protein boom, through an interdisciplinary exploration of how protein has garnered this hold on the nutritional imagination over the past two centuries. Second, I am leading a project titled Respiratory Justice, supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation, that posits breath and breathing as central to global social and environmental crises and as the corporeal basis for a politics of shared vulnerability.
Postgraduate Students
I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students interested in critical, qualitative studies of sport, health, culture and the body. Within those parameters, I am open to supervising a range of topics and issues including but not limited to those explored in my research.
Publications
Recent publications
- King, S., & Weedon, G. (2026). Protein: Economies and Ecologies of a Nutritional Superstar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://proteinthebook.org/
- Weedon, G., & Brown. J. C. “I Just Don’t Want to do it Knowing I’d Struggle:” Chronic Breathlessness, Breathe Easy, and the Paradox of Exercise as Medicine. Qualitative Research in Sport, Health, and Exercise. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2026.2721381
- Harris, A., Weedon, G., & Bowes, A. (2026). The Passion Paradox in Women's Sport Journalism: Precarity, Sisterhood, and the Affective Labour of Championing Women’s Sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/10126902261492344
- Weedon, G., & Patchin, P. (2026). Epidemic, not Event: The BP Oil Spill, Petrochemical Public Relations, and the Making of BP Syndrome. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 116(3): 642-657. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2587226
- Weedon, G., & Wilson, B. A Novel Form of Capture: Podcasts, Platform Capitalism, and the Intensification of the Sport Media Complex. Sociology of Sport Journal. 32(3): 147-148. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2025-0013
- Weedon, G. (2025). Political Ecologies of Sport and Physical Culture. In the SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Culture. Edited by Michael D. Giardina, Michele K. Donnelly, & Devra J. Waldman (pp. pp. 291-309). Sage) London: Sage.