Media studies expert seeks better representation of Paralympic athletes
Tatiane Hilgemberg
Journalist, Media Studies Professor, Expert in Sports and Disability Communications
Fulbright Visiting Scholar from Brazil
Dr. Tatiane Hilgemberg, a professor and media studies expert at Brazil’s Roraima Federal University, combines her love of sports with her professional training as a journalist to address disparities in coverage of the Olympic and Paralympic games. Her provocative writings, such as Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?, illuminate the issue and challenge media industry conventions.
As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at University of Texas, Arlington, Hilgemberg examined social media representation among paralympic athletes. Her Fulbright experience has helped her to make significant contributions to the growing field of disability studies, as well as gender, sports, and media analysis.
She first witnessed the stark contrast in coverage of the 2004 Olympics and Paralympics as an undergraduate journalism student in Brazil. In that year, the Brazilian Paralympic delegation ranked 14th in the medal count as compared to the Olympic delegation’s 16th ranking, yet Paralympic coverage was relegated to brief summaries rather than the robust coverage afforded to the Olympic Games. She has worked to correct these kinds of disparities for the past two decades.
Hilgemberg has since advanced her research on disabilities through a master’s thesis on how the Portuguese and Brazilian media portrayed the Paralympic Games between 1996 and 2008. She continued her investigation as a doctoral candidate at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil, focusing on portrayals of Paralympic athletes in Brazilian media during the 2012 Games. She conducted extensive interviews to gain an understanding of the athletes’ perceptions of how they were represented. She conducted part of her doctoral research at Australia’s Curtin University, where she turned to a more particular focus on athletes’ self-perceptions on social media, with the framework of feminist disability studies.
Hilgemberg began teaching media studies at Roraima Federal University in 2018. She and two university colleagues co-authored two studies on coverage of the 2016 Paralympics in Rio, which were published in the Brazilian journals Cadernos de Comunicação and Comunicação & Sociedade. One study investigated gender issues in the media coverage of the Paralympic Games by the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, and one analyzed photographs of the Paralympic Games published by three of Brazil’s major news outlets, to determine the social representation of female athletes with disabilities.
As her expertise grew, Hilgemberg began to feel an obligation to advocate for better representation of Paralympians, explaining, “I believe that science must serve a purpose,” and that academia has a responsibility to contribute to society’s advancement.
This mission inspired her to embark on a Fulbright at UT Arlington. The university boasts one of the oldest adaptive sports programs in the United States, affording Dr. Hilgemberg the opportunity to meet with athletes and coaches, including Paralympians, and attend a wheelchair basketball tournament. As Hilgemberg puts it, these experiences provided her with “a more accurate perspective of how sports for people with disabilities is conducted and seen in the United States, and how athletes relate to media content – traditional and social media.” At UT Arlington, she also saw accessible models in teaching that shaped her own course design. She collaborated with the Disability Studies and Communications Departments and conducted a study examining how Paralympic athletes represented themselves on social media during the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games.
The strong sports culture in Texas encouraged her to attend an XFL and NBA game, which “not only improved my research but gave me tools that I incorporate in some of my classes, for example Sports Journalism and Media Studies and Consumer Culture,” Hilgemberg remarks. “The networks, collaborations and dialogues created during the Fulbright program will help me not only to solidify my research, but also solve the problems that my work is pointing out.”
She credits two UT Arlington faculty members—Dr. Beth Haller, a leading researcher in the field of media and disabilities, and her academic adviser, Dr. Sarah Rose—with introducing her to important researchers in the field and new ways of thinking about disability. The collaboration continues beyond her Fulbright, with Hilgemberg currently writing a chapter for the book “Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and Disability in the Global South,” for which Haller is an editor.
Hilgemberg’s Fulbright continues to prove fruitful for faculty and students at both UT Arlington and her home institution, Roraima Federal University. During her Fulbright, the UT Arlington Disability Studies department invited Hilgemberg to give a lecture that was simultaneously broadcast to faculty and students in Brazil. The Department of Communications invited her to speak with a sports narrative class, where she found that the U.S. students “were not familiar with the idea that Paralympic athletes are subject to limited, and often stereotypical, media representation.” Hilgemberg explained that media representation of Paralympians is typically one of two extremes, either as a victim or a hero.
Since her Fulbright, Hilgemberg has resumed teaching her classes related to digital media, web journalism, and cyberculture at Roraima, and plans to add a course in sports journalism. She will also conduct post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Brazil.
Reflecting on the opportunity to conduct research abroad, Hilgemberg says that experiencing “different cultures, opinions, religions, history, food, landscape, and traditions…opens your mind to the beauty and problems of the world according to different perspectives.” She reflects that Fulbright “helped me to better understand the world, ”
Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program.
Each year more than 900 faculty and professionals from more than 100 countries around the world receive Fulbright Visiting Scholar awards for advanced research and university lecturing in the United States. Information on how to apply, including eligibility and deadlines, is available through the binational Fulbright Commission or the public affairs section of the U.S. Embassy in the scholars’ home country.