In this paper, which is a revised and modified version of the 2019 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Alan Ingham Memorial lecture, the author shares four views, contributions, and opportunities that sports sociologists might consider useful in how to decolonize as well as indigenize our discipline together. The need to actively engage in the theory and practice of how to decolonize

This article deploys a qualitative media content analysis to examine discourses linking sport, head injury, and longer term neurocognitive decline. It draws on a seminal British television documentary and associated print media coverage to demonstrate that the representation of sport-related brain injury is intricately connected to both conceptions of risk in sport and a wider social response to aging

This paper examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that ...

Building upon prior theoretical and empirical work, this study explores the sport participation trajectories of children across different socio-economic status (SES) categories to assess the possib...

Bicycles have been hailed by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations for use in social and economic development. However, there is a lacuna of research exploring the value of bicycles for development (BFD) outside of Europe and America. Specifically, there is a lack of research on the structure and perspectives of BFD organizations. This study draws on 19 semistructured interviews with

This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the

Between 2000 and 2018, the number of fights in professional hockey decreased by more than half, reflecting rule changes intended to preserve player health. A 2019 playoff fight ignited debate on social media over the place of fighting in hockey. This research involved a content analysis of an incendiary tweet and the 920 replies it solicited. Content analysis confirmed that cultural backlash exists

This article contextualizes recent concerns about rest in the National Basketball Association by considering the concurrent rise of a promotional sleep culture. This work builds upon Grant Farred’s analysis of the event of the Black athletic body at rest. Drawing on research from the cultural studies of sport and the critical sleep literature, the author complicates the idea that rest, broadly conceived

The research examined spatiality of The Village during the Commonwealth Games XXI. Central to the research is the perspective of the parasport athlete. By foregrounding this perspective, new understandings of the geography of sporting spaces become possible. The integrated nature of the Games establishes The Village as a significant space to consider spatiality and disability. Ethnographic methodology

This article presents the performance factors identified by Olympic athletes and analyzes how they were prioritized and implemented during the 2012–2016 Olympiad. To address this issue, 28 semistructured interviews were conducted with French athletes who participated in the Olympic Games in 2016. The analysis shows that to achieve performance, only two factors were implemented by all the athletes:

It is often claimed that elite sport success increases national pride as well as the international prestige of a country. To scrutinize this broad-shed assumption, we draw on data from an online su...

To date, no sociological studies of professional athletes have investigated the lived experiences of sportspeople in highly publicly-visible occupations that provide relatively few opportunities for back-stage relaxation from role demands. Drawing on findings from a British Academy-funded project examining high-profile sports workers, and employing Goffman’s dramaturgical insights, this article provides

Drawing on contact, social identity, and self-categorization theories, this study examines the extent to which adolescent sports participation associates with (a) concern about the treatment of min...

Journal Name: Sociology of Sport Journal Volume: 38 Issue: 1 Pages: 98-99

Policy makers often ascribe sports clubs an important societal role, as they can encourage the integration of people with a migration background. Questions then arise as to the extent that members with a migration background are integrated in sports clubs and what the factors are that play a role in this integration. The data for this research are drawn from a comparative study of 10 European countries

Recent scholarship suggests that women in martial arts and combat sports have increasingly begun to undo gender by challenging gender norms and constructing new femininities. Most of this research, however, has focused on gender dynamics within martial arts and combat sports settings, rather than outside of them. For this study, I conducted semistructured interviews with 40 professional women’s mixed

Families and sports are spaces for “doing” and “undoing” gender. The author presents qualitative interviews with 30 American men who recall their parents’ involvement in the gender atypical sport of baton twirling. The author analyzes the data using “doing” and “undoing” gender as well as “hard” and “soft” essentialism frameworks. Mothers are often supportive of their sons’ twirling, contributing to

In 2019, the International Paralympic Committee produced a new strategy that highlighted the need to promote disability activism through Para sport. The purpose of this study is to understand what promoting disability activism through Para sport means to key stakeholders within an Irish national-level sociopolitical and Para sport context. Three groups of Irish stakeholders participated in interviews

Athletic success in women’s sports, in particular in women’s soccer, is strongly linked to macrolevel gender equality within societies. There is also evidence that macrolevel gender equality matters for sport consumption. This study explored the role of mesolevel institutions for the popularity of women’s soccer. The example of reunified Germany illustrates that macrolevel gender equality might be

Despite an increase of advocacy by established nongovernmental sport organizations, little is known about how advocacy is enacted and with what effects. Building conceptually on frame alignment theory and empirically on interview data from 19 Swedish Regional Sport Federations, this article investigates how advocates politicize sport to gain “insider status” and analyses the by-products of such efforts

Sport is often considered an important part of United Kingdom (U.K.) university life. However, a limited amount of research has explored inclusion in university sport, particularly considering student union officers’ perceptions. As part of a wider study on LGBT+ sport, a U.K.-wide survey was conducted with officers, alongside focus groups at four institutions. Findings suggest further action can be

Pain has long been associated with sports participation, being analyzed variously as a physical phenomenon, as well as a sociocultural construct in sport sociological literature. In this article, the authors employ a sociological–phenomenological approach to generate novel insights into the underresearched domain of “lived” pain in competitive swimming. Analytic attention is paid to specific aspects

In this study, scholarship was extended on the cultural meanings of race and athlete activism by interrogating one key media spectacle surrounding athlete protests: President Trump’s 2017 speech questioning the National Football League (NFL) players’ character, with a focus on NFL owners’ responses. The NFL owners’ statements (n = 32) were subjected to critical discourse analysis. Discourses of post-racial

This article draws on the responses of 2,347 football fans (male = 83.4%; female = 16.6%) collected via an online survey from September 2015 to January 2016 regarding the position of women (as fans, coaches, referees, journalists, board members, and administrators) in the gender order in men’s professional association football in the United Kingdom. Engaging with the theoretical framework of hegemonic

Journal Name: Sociology of Sport Journal Volume: 37 Issue: 4 Pages: 376-377

The 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games (GC2018) were the first to offer equal medal opportunities to men and women as part of a broader strategic push by the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) to promote gender equality. In this article we analyze images of GC2018 sportswomen and associated headlines and captions in what we are calling “traditional” and “non-traditional” media outlets. At first glance

Curling was perhaps once the sport the least associated with discipline and athleticism, instead having a reputation for drinking and smoking, an ethos prizing conviviality over competition, and a ...

Journal Name: Sociology of Sport Journal Volume: 37 Issue: 4 Pages: 378-379

There is a key tension associated with ethnographic explorations into the lives of people in the Global South – ‘outsider’ researchers from the Global North who lack experience of the environments they are seeking to understand. A considered response, therefore, is for scholars to seek physical immersion in a field—to live among those they are trying to understand. Such ethnographic inquiries are optimal

This article presents the findings of 2,415 posts collected from two prominent Australian Football League message boards that responded to a racist incident involving a banana being thrown at Adelaide Crows player, Eddie Betts, in August 2016. It adopts Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to examine the online practice of fans for evidence of racist discourse and the extent to which this was supported or

Diversity and representation in sport governing bodies has become an issue for both public discussion and academic debate in recent times. Previous work has primarily centered on gender inequalities within the forever changing masculine terrain of sport. However, no work has yet examined the representation and participation of young people in the decision-making structures of sporting bodies. This

In this article, which is an expanded and updated adaptation of the 2018 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Presidential Address, I look at the challenges and opportunities presented to the field by the Sokal 2.0 hoax. Specifically, I look at issues of epistemology and politics as expressed in, and produced through, the field(s) of sport sociology, physical cultural studies, and critical

Sociologists of sport and coaching have repeatedly drawn upon the theoretical tools of Michel Foucault to map and critique the negative effects of coaches’ use of disciplinary practices. Three SCCs and two coach developers participated in multiple learning community meetings interrogating Foucault’s concepts to understand how power moves, create new, less disciplinary practices, and address the problems

In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight Victorian swimming coaches to examine the discourses of disability1 and inclusion that they expressed in relation to their current coaching practices. Analysis specifically pursued links between neoliberalism, ableism, elitism, classification and inclusion in coaching, with the intention of exploring what discourse relations are possible

Using Fragile Families data (N = 2,581), this study analyzes father’s engagement in sports and outdoor activities with their nine year-old child. It also considers the implications of these interactions for health and father-child relationships. First, the results indicate patterns of relatively high levels of father engagement. Most fathers reported doing sports or outdoor activities with their child

In this paper, we use data from focus group interviews with young athletes to explore their thinking about coach-athlete sexual relationships (CASRs). Our aim is to further the understanding of the ambivalence surrounding CASRs in the sports field, which are simultaneously viewed as ethically problematic and acceptable—at least when they involve high-profile adult athletes. Inspired by Swidler’s toolkit

Journal Name: Sociology of Sport Journal Volume: 37 Issue: 4 Pages: 380-381

We study (fe)male adolescents’ interest in watching sports as a spectator using logistic multilevel analyses based on a representative sample of 5837 Flemish (Belgian) pupils in the first year of s...

This study addressed the issue of interpersonal trust and distrust in the (sporting) workplace. Data were generated through cyclical, in-depth interviews with 12 community sports coaches. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Hardin and Cook’s theorization of (dis)trust and Goffman’s dramaturgical writings providing the primary heuristic devices. Our analysis produced

Women now compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship for which Muay Thai is a feeder discipline. It is timely to analyze how the tools of this pugilist trade, women’s bodies, are lived and discursively positioned. We explore how bodily attributes (strength and beauty) are positioned vis-a-vis women fighters by drawing on 17 interviews with women Muay Thai fighters. We argue while women are in control

There exists a broad body of scholarly work that focuses on how communities, and individuals therein, mobilize, respond, and harvest collective action in response to tragedy. Despite this interest,...

There are two cultural narratives often purported within the American sports cultures of basketball and football. First, those participating within these sports are African American athletes from p...

The increasingly popular sport of feline agility animates human and feline bodies through the construction of rules, obstacles, technologies, and norms. Feline agility, then, involves the managemen...

In the past 15 years, sport scholars have expressed an increased interest in public sociology, while the rapid acceleration of digital media has led to significant shifts in the sport media landsca...

This article focuses on the reflections of 1,015 sports fans collected via an online survey from June 2017 to September 2017 regarding their experience and perception of risk, security, and terrori...

This paper concerns the performance of sport politics. We carry out a text analysis of a year-long media debate that raged in Norwegian newspapers throughout 2016. After the Medias had critiqued ho...

This article analyzes how representatives of two sports-based interventions in Sweden conceptualize the ways in which different forms of social relations facilitate social inclusion and integration. The articulated statements are analyzed from a discursive and governmentality perspective. The analysis spotlights how sports practices ideally provide inclusive and bridging meetings between schools and

In studies within the sport for development (SFD) field, critical researchers often recognize that they are an intimate part of the production of knowledge. In particular, researchers adopting a po...

Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theoretical framework that has been gaining much recognition in sport literature, is a useful and beneficial tool in discussing race and racism. To better understand t...

This paper situates Euro-Western sport within a broader settler colonial logic of elimination that frames Indigenous bodies, cultures, and ideas within a politics of containment in the production o...

Stacking—the tendency of playing positions to be racially segregated in sports—remains prominent in gridiron football. This raises questions of how stacking persists and how opportunities arise for athletes of different races to assume different roles. Demographic data on 41,484 NCAA football players reveal differences in opportunities and playing roles for student-athletes of different races. In concert

In this autoethnography, I describe my own personal experiences and dealings with a sport-related concussion. In particular, I focus on the (re)negotiation of my student- athlete identity due to th...

The new material turn in social sciences and humanities has drawn attention to how the material interacts with the social in the world where both human and non-human actors produce power relations. To include the material objects and their environments within the social analysis, new materialists argue for a new onto-epistemology that departs from the humanist social constructionism. To explore what

The present study explores recent changes in performances of masculinity in the West, through an exploration of the status of adolescent boys participating in mostly adult martial arts groups. Drawing on a qualitative methodology of ethnographic participation and in-depth interviews, I argue that adolescent boys simultaneously occupy positions of centrality and marginality. Hierarchies of age and seniority

This article examines how 32 mostly white university students understand the NFL players’ protests. We argue students processed the protests (and protesters) through a racialized lens of whiteness that led to two modes of interpreting the protests: the protests are unpatriotic and the protests are patriotic. These categories are primarily based on how students account for African-American NFL players’

The marginalization and exclusion of women in boxing has emerged as a severe global problem, threatening women’s democratic right to equal participation in sport. The following article is based on ...

In this paper, I examine the place of the Canadian Football League’s (CFL) Saskatchewan Roughriders in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan’s political history. Drawing on Canadian political econo...

This paper reports findings from a study of Canadian mainstream media coverage of anti-Olympic protests around the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The study included an experiment with a hybrid analytic approach, as we drew together Galtung’s “peace journalism” (PJ) framework with a more critically and contextually-oriented strategy. We found that articles written about the anti-Olympic protests commonly

This paper draws upon data collected from a critical discourse analysis of CrossFit Kids Magazine (CFKM) and examines how children in/and physical activity are represented in this contemporary sporting (con)text. I propose that the magazine promotes physical activity among children and youth but in so doing relies upon and actively (re)produces certain ideas and beliefs about children and about parenting

This project will specifically focus on the symbiotic relationship between the intercollegiate athletics program and corporatization of educational functions and leadership at Towson University as emblematic of the influence that neoliberal corporate capitalism has had on institutions of higher education and its stakeholders. We offer a genealogy of Towson University athletics to interrogate how the