The research project Boxing Hearts and Beats is part of the larger doctoral project, Sweet Science and Gender on the Ropes: Gender in Amateur Boxing Communities, which focuses on analysing gender, body, and embodiment in amateur boxing communities in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). This doctoral project is framed by research questions that can be divided into two broad categories:

i) How do boxers relationally and sensorially 'un/do' gender in boxing?

ii) How do boxing practices on the bodily level resist or subvert the various matrixes of domination boxers are woven in?

iii) What role do music and sound play in the 'un/doing' gender in boxing?

The second group of questions examines the ways these gender configurations and bodily experiences are translated into embodied ways of being:

i) How do everyday boxing practices construct gendered embodiments?

ii) How does mixed-sex boxing training challenge conventional notions of gendered embodiment?

iii) How do boxers negotiate ideas of gender distinction and themselves as gendered in relation to their bodily experiences and interactions in boxing?

This research, inspired by the sweaty, smelly, sticky, loud, gentle, and bloody boxing interactions sets the following aims:

i) To problematise methodological and theoretical approaches to the body and embodiment that overlook our intercorporeal, sensory base of experience.

ii) To illuminate the minute, sensory components of un/doing gender that inform and shape our gendered embodiment.

To do so, the project develops a sensory ethnographic research design. Situated within the sports field, it addresses the concerns raised by some ethnographers regarding the dominance of the visual. It calls for more attention to be given to other senses. Most of the sports experience is sensual; thus, articulating it verbally or analysing it solely through sight misses important dimensions of this social world.