معرفی
Ellen Sverkersson is a researcher at Linnaeus University's Department of Social Work within the Faculty of Social Sciences. She recently completed her doctoral thesis in 2025 titled 'Women's use of Image and performance-enhancing drugs: Exploring Gender, Bodies and Risks in Digital forums and Beyond,' establishing herself as an emerging scholar in the intersection of gender studies, doping research, and fitness culture.
Her research focuses on women's experiences with Image and Performance-Enhancing Drugs (IPEDs) within fitness contexts, with particular attention to how gender dynamics shape risk assessment, online communication, and resistance to male hegemony in doping communities. Sverkersson employs ethnographic methods to explore how women navigate digital spaces to share knowledge about doping practices, challenging traditional masculine-dominated narratives in performance enhancement.
Sverkersson's publication record from 2019-2025 reveals a consistent research trajectory examining gendered dimensions of doping. Her work demonstrates how women develop 'Sis Science' knowledge communities online, negotiate body image pressures, and contest traditional gender norms through drug use practices. Recent publications increasingly focus on temporal and spatial dimensions of women's IPED trajectories within fitness culture.
She is an active member of two research environments at Linnaeus University: the Ethnographic Forum, which focuses on qualitative fieldwork methods, and the interdisciplinary Health, Gender and Embodiment research group. Her doctoral project 'Women's fitness doping' built upon earlier work from the completed project 'Pumping up the ego: Biographical studies on young people's doping trajectories.'
