A Two-Study Investigation Into How Television News Frames the Steroid Scandal in Major League Baseball and Fans’ Support for Bonds, McGwire, and Palmeiro’s Pending Induction Into the Baseball Hall of Fame
Under the guidance of social categorization theory (SCT), this project analyzed news coverage of steroid use in major league baseball (MLB), and fans’ perceptions of three players indicted for using steroids—Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Rafael Palmeiro—should be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Study 1 results revealed that widespread attention was given to […]
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A Welsh European: Golf, Tourism and the Remaking of National Imaging
The Ryder Cup is a biennial golf match between Europe and the USA that was staged in Wales for the first time in 2010. This article considers the representation of Wales within tourism texts through an analysis of the place of an individual. To date, little scholarship has examined the position of individuals within such […]
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Academic Performance Programs: New Directions and (Dis)connections in Academic Reform
The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to Harrison’s (2012) work. The author suggests that the one-size-fits all approach the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has adopted when implementing academic reform measures ultimately hurts the athletes the reforms are intended to benefit.
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What it Means to be a ‘Lady’: Defending the “Lady Vols” Nickname and Logo
Scholars have contested the use of Lady in team nicknames since the 1980s, as the practice might suggest otherness and inferiority (Eitzen & Zinn, 1989). This study is set in the context of the 2012 merger of the women’s athletic departments at the University of Tennessee and the 2014 announcement that the university would eliminate […]
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“Who Are You?”: Exploring Adolescent Girls’ Process of Identification
We used ethnographic methods to examine the ways that adolescent girls (n=9) defined and understood themselves as individuals and in relation to cultural identities. We utilized Cook-Sather’s (2002, 2006, 2007) theory of translation to make sense of their identification as an unfixed process of negotiation by centering their voices and revelations. While the girls struggled […]
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“Woolmergate”: Sport and the Representation of Islam and Muslims in the British Press
This article illustrates how the media represent Islam and Muslims in the post-9/11 context through an examination of British newspaper coverage of the death of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer at the 2007 Cricket World Cup. The article argues that key elements of the cultural stereotyping of Islam and Muslims identified in Said’s Orientalism—namely, violence, irrationality, […]
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“You Shall Not Murder”: Atos at the Paralympic Games
At the London 2012 Paralympic Games, a controversy arose regarding Paralympic sponsor Atos, the French IT company contracted at £400 million to implement the UK Government’s Work Capability Assessment. Atos was accused of falling short of professional codes of conduct, including declaring fit for work persons who subsequently died following removal of their benefits. The […]
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“You Should See me on the Inside”: Researching the Post-Stroke Mental Health of a Male Professor of Sport
This research note offers an original contribution to methodological discussion qua mental health, and associated emotionality, within the workplace of sport academia. Our1 focus is the poststroke mental health of a male sociology of sport professor, and discussions are divided into two sections. The first section, which reiterates the title: ‘you should see me on […]
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(Dis)Locating Nations in the World Cup: Football Fandom and the Global Geopolitics of Affect
The World Cup, as a tournament that pits national teams against one another, initially seems to be a site where support for sports is tied to nations. However, situating this sporting event at the intersection of discourses of globalization, transnational circulation of capital and populations, and theories of fandom, our examination of diasporic populations found […]
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(Im)Mobile bodies: Contemporary Semi-Professional Dancers’ Experiences with Injuries
The purpose of this research was to examine semi-professional contemporary dancers’ experiences with injuries. Similar to athletes, dancers are often injured. Much of the previous research on dance injuries, however, has focused on ballet where the professional requirements and high technical level create demanding work conditions. Semi-professional contemporary dance differs from this context due to […]
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(Re)Defining the Situation When Football Fans Rush the Field
Drawing on 251 incident reports, this study explores American football fans’ decisions to rush the field to celebrate a victory despite pleas from university officials and the police to abstain. We explore the symbolic interactions through which students defined this situation and acted within it. Our findings characterize this event as series of ongoing interactions […]
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(Super)Diversity and the Migration–Social Work Nexus: A New Lens on the Field of Access and Inclusion?
The notions of diversity and superdiversity are of promising relevance to social work with immigrant clients. They enable a nuanced appreciation of the complex and varied sources of inequality to which such clients are exposed. However, these categories are sometimes employed in overly principled or prescriptive tones, and their distinctive contribution is relatively under-debated. How […]
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[Transgender]Young Men: Gendered Subjectivities and the Physically Active Body
In this paper, I discuss [transgender] young men’s social, physical and embodied experiences of sport. These discussions draw from interview research with two young people who prefer to self-identify as ‘male’ and not as ‘trans men’, although they do make use of this term. Finn and Ed volunteered to take part in the research following […]
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#LOL at Multiculturalism: Reactions to Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi From the Twitterverse
Arguably, two aspects of national identity that Canadians are most recognized for are hockey and multiculturalism; yet, few scholars have examined the implications of Canada’s mythological and nostalgic hockey culture for immigrants from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. This analysis uses Twitter to gain uncensored insight into how Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi (HNIC Punjabi) […]
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`Generation X Games’, Action Sports and the Olympic Movement: Understanding the Cultural Politics of Incorporation
An important and mounting issue for the contemporary Olympic Movement is how to remain relevant to younger generations. Cognizant of the diminishing numbers of youth viewers, and the growing success of the X Games – the ‘Olympics’ of action sport – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) set about adding a selection of youth-oriented action sports […]
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A “Snapshot” of Physical Activity and Food Habits Among Private School Children in India
Concerns about increasing obesity in poorer parts of the world, including India, have often been premised in terms of global shifts in activity levels and caloric consumption. Lifestyle changes have been documented in large cities, but we do not know whether these changes are reaching young people in less urban locations. This study used photo […]
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A Case Study of the Diversity Culture of an American University Athletic Department: Perceptions of Senior Level Administrators
The topic of diversity has received considerable attention from scholars who study sport within the context of higher education in the USA. But despite this interest in the topic, an in-depth focus on how college and university athletic departments effectively manage diversity is missing from the literature. Therefore, we conducted an intrinsic case study of […]
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A Comparison of Hometown Socioeconomics and Demographics for Black and White Elite Football Players in the US
Despite widespread perceptions of elite US sport as meritocratic, there is little empirical research on the social origins of those who play college and professional sports in the US or how these vary by race. We use the case of American football, linking Entertainment and Sports Programming Network’s national recruit rankings data on incoming college […]
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A Comprehensive Review of Faith-Based Physical Activity Interventions
This review provides a summary of physical activity interventions delivered in faith-based organizations. Electronic databases were searched to identify relevant studies. After screening, a total of n = 27 articles matched our inclusion criteria; 19 were identified as faith-based interventions (some spiritual or Biblical element included in the intervention) and 8 as faith-placed interventions (no […]
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A Crisis of Confidence: Women Coaches’ Responses to Their Engagement in Resistance
This study centres upon the accounts of master women coaches based in the UK, exploring how they have individually experienced such acts of resistance as reaching the top of such a male dominated profession. By going beyond previous positivist feminist approaches to this focus of inquiry, I employ a feminist cultural studies framework to understand […]
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A Critical Exploration of Using Football in Health and Welfare Programs: Gender Masculinities and Social Relations
This article offers a theoretical exploration of the growing trend in the United Kingdom to utilize football(soccer) practices and ideas in various health and welfare programs, primarily as a means of engaging men. Drawing on critical men’s health studies, pro-feminist critiques of sport, and the notion of hegemonic masculinities, we survey the “field of play” […]
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A Culture of Trust: Engaging Muslim Women in Community Sport Organizations
This article examines the impetus for, and process of, engaging Muslim women in community sport. The research focuses on how and why a community sport organization, located in a large Australian city, embraced cultural change and developed a more inclusive community sport environment through social capital facilitation. The operation of the three types of social […]
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A Disposition of Risk: Climbing Practice, Reflexive Modernity and the Habitus
The paper utilizes climbing practice to examine how risk societies generate risk consciousness in agents. It critiques the cognitive basis of reflexivity, particularly in Beck’s work, and seeks an alternative rooted in embodied practice. Sweetman’s ‘reflexive habitus’ serves as a starting point to synthesize a relationship between Ulrich Beck’s risk society and Bourdieu’s theory of […]
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I had No Desire to be Having This Battle With This Faceless Man on the Soccer Field Anymore: Exploring the Ethics of Sporting Retirement
In this article, I examine the relatively youthful sporting retirement of four athletes from popular Western team sports, namely soccer, ice hockey and rugby union. Drawing on studies of sporting transitions and retirement (e.g., Denison, 1997; Douglas & Carless, 2009; Sparkes, 1998; Sparkes & Smith, 2002; Stambulova, Alfermann, Statler, & Côté, 2009; Wylleman, Alfermann, & […]
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I was Banging my Head Against a Brick wall: Exclusionary Power and the Gendering of Sport Organisations
The under-representation of women in sport management has increasingly been recognized by government and nongovernment organizations, and there has been some attempt to redress the imbalance. Research has indicated, however, that the gendering of sport organizations is not simply a numbers’ game. The purpose of this study was to analyze the exercise of exclusionary power […]
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I Will. Protect This House: Under Armour, Corporate Nationalism and Post-9/11 Cultural Politics
This article explores the construction of U.S. nationalism through the branding strategies of Under Armour, a sportswear company which has achieved prominence in the U.S. marketplace and has a growing international profile. By examining their organizational synergies with the NFL, Zephyr technology, and the Wounded Warrior Project, and through a critical reading of the militaristic, […]
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It Ain’t Just Black Kids and White Kids: The Representation and Reproduction of Authentic “Skurban” Masculinities
The recent emergence of “skurban” (the fusion of skateboarding and urban) reflects the racially diverse history and culture of skateboarding within urban areas in the United States. Skurban follows on from skateboarding’s integral link with the urban since the 1980s. We aver that urban skateboarding is now underpinned by proliferating racial formations that reproduce a […]
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It’s a Concrete Ceiling; It’s Not Even Glass: Understanding Tenets of Organizational Culture That Supports the Progression of Women as Coaches and Coach Developers
The purpose of this study was to explore what particular areas of organizational cultures facilitate the development and progression of women’s football coaches and coach developers. The English Football Association provided the context for the research. Previous statistics demonstrate that recruitment, retention, and progression of women in English football coaching and tutoring are lower and […]
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It’s Dude Time!: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows
The last quarter century has seen a dramatic movement of girls and women into sport, but this social change is reflected unevenly in sports media. This study, a 5-year update to a 25-year longitudinal study, indicates that the quantity of coverage of women’s sports in televised sports news and highlights shows remains dismally low. Even […]
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It’s Supposed to be About the Love of the Game, Not the Love of Aaron Rodgers ’Eyes: Challenging the Exclusions of Women Sports Fans
Feminist sports scholars characterize sport as a masculine domain wherein the ideology of male superiority and dominance is structurally and symbolically perpetuated. Researchers similarly identify sports fan communities as exclusionary to women and sites for the reaffirmation of gendered hierarchies. The purpose of this project is to examine the gendered meanings of sports fandom. Using […]
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Just Because I Dance like a Ho I’m Not a Ho: Cheerleading at the Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender
Feminist sociologists of sport have critiqued cheerleading for perpetuating gendered divisions of labor and dismissing women’s athleticism. However, no research has centered the experiences of black college cheerleaders or cheerleaders with formal feminist education. Through ethnography and interviews with cheerleaders who attend a historically black college (HBCU) for women, this research reveals how race, class, […]
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Nowhere for me to go: Black Female Student-Athlete Experiences on a Predominantly White Campus
Black female student-athletes are often compared to Black men or White women; however, they stand at the intersection of multiple identities and encounter challenges related to being Black, female, and student-athletes (Howard-Hamilton, 2001). This is an in-depth case study of one Division I women’s basketball team at a predominantly White university on the west coast. […]
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Rimi Bowl and the Quest for Authenticity: Fan Autonomy and Commodification in Norwegian Football
Football in Norway is facing similar challenges as other European leagues regarding dwindling crowds and financial instability, in the wake of the neoliberal boom from the 1990s and well into the new millennium. The years between 1990 and 2008 saw a doubling of average crowds for top-level games. Yet since 2008, there has been a […]
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Shredding the Love: A Feminist Political Economy Critique of Gendered Lifestyle Branding
This manuscript takes the controversy over Burton’s “Love” snowboard, which featured Playboy Playmates, as a case study for understanding contemporary practices of gendered lifestyle branding in alternative sport. I employ a feminist political economic critique of the Love as a form of gendered branding that constructs the Burton brand as a “platform for action,” inviting […]
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The Downfall of a Man is Not the End of His Life: Navigating Involuntary Immobility in Ghanaian Football
The burgeoning number of football academies in Africa are widely understood by young aspiring players and their family members as a conduit for transnational migration and a professional career in the game. However, for the vast majority of academy recruits the stark reality is involuntary immobility. While there is a growing literature on African football […]
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The Mad Russian: Representations of Alexander Ovechkin and the Creation of Canadian National Identity
The paper argues that the Canadian media’s representations of National Hockey League (NHL) player Alexander Ovechkin work to locate Canadian national identity through its contrasts with the hockey superstar. Even though the press celebrates Ovechkin as a challenge to Cold War understandings of Soviet hockey players as lacking passion and heart as well as physical […]
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The Social Benefits of Informal and Lifestyle Sports: A Research Agenda
Understanding sport through the lens of social benefit has become a mainstay of sport policy analysis. A wealth of research has considered how sport contributes to achieving wider social benefits, including improvements to health and well-being, life satisfaction, crime reduction, community cohesion and activism, environmental stewardship, educational attainment, labour market participation, civic renewal, urban regeneration […]
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The Spanish Fury: A Political Geography of Soccer in Spain
Soccer in Spain functions as a powerful ideological apparatus. Historically, the underperformance of the national selection (“Spanish Fury”) was attributed to a lack of patriotism on part of players from ethno-regional peripheries. The recent successes (2008, 2012 Euro Cup and 2010 World Cup) of Spanish soccer are hailed as proof of a modern country that […]
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There’s a Cultural Pride Through Our Games: Enhancing the Sport Experiences of Indigenous Youth in Canada Through Participation in Traditional Games
The purpose of this community-based participatory research was to better understand how participation in traditional games can enhance the sport experiences of Indigenous youth. Eight Indigenous youth (14-18 years) and 10 adults living in various communities in the Northwest Territories, Canada, participated in either a one-on-one interview or group interview. Data were analyzed using an […]
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They Need to Learn to Take it on the Chin: Exploring the Emotional Labour of Student Volunteers in a Sports-Based Outreach Project in the Northeast of England
This research explores the emotional labour of university students whilst volunteering on the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) sports-based outreach project. Using data from semi-structured interviews with students (n = 40) this paper draws on the work of Arlie Hochschild (1983, 2012) to explore the feeling, display and regulation of emotion by this cohort […]
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This Dancing Business is More Hazardous Than Any ‘He-Man’ Sport: Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers
Selecting Springfield College, founding home of the International YMCA as a training ground for male dancers was an inspired choice by American modern dancer Ted Shawn given the founding credo of the College to ‘build builders of men.’ I would like to see men dancing in gymnasiums and stadiums, he claimed, so that the dance […]
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Together We Can Make It Better: Collective Action and Governance in a Girls’ Ice Hockey Association
This paper, drawing on collective action literature and situated within the women’s sport movement, offers a case study of a separate girls’ minor hockey association that formed in Ontario in the mid-1990s. The analysis explores the process of establishing a girls’ hockey association that is separate from the boys’ minor hockey umbrella. Two fundamental collective […]
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We Cannot Stand Idly By: A Necessary Call for a Public Sociology of Sport
The aim of what follows is to participate in an ongoing conversation that has taken place within the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS), as well as in sociology and the academy writ large, regarding public engagement and what our role is or should be as critical scholars of sports and physical […]
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Josh Wears Pink Cleats: Inclusive Masculinity on the Soccer Field
In this ethnographic research of a college-based soccer team at a large liberal college in Northeast America, I document the existence of more inclusive versions of masculinity that contrast conventional understandings of male teamsport athletes. Using participant observation and 21 in-depth interviews, I show that these men demonstrate metrosexual and inclusive behaviors and attitudes. The […]
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Just Look at Her!: Sporting Bodies as Athletic Resistance and the Limits of Sport Norms in the Case of Caster Semenya
Using the American sport media’s treatment of South African runner Caster Semenya, this article explores how in the course of defending Caster Semenyathe American sport media presented a rigorous challenge to traditional conceptions of sex and gender. Yet these rhetorical efforts to deconstruct sex and gender binaries were undermined by the specific ways in which […]
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Let’s Hug it Out, Bitch: HBO’s Entourage, Masculinity in Crisis, and the Value of Audience Studies
Media scholars have begun to examine how masculinities function in the media through exploration of a variety of texts and personas; however, most have sought to do so by using textual analysis. We argue that this emphasis on textual analysis has overshadowed scholarship on media audiences, limiting opportunities to understand how audiences’ gender identities are […]
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Too Good to be True?: US and Chinese Media Coverage of Chinese Swimmer Ye Shiwen in the 2012 Olympic Games
This study examined Chinese and US newspaper coverage of the controversial performance of female Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen during 2012 London Summer Olympics. While Ye won two gold medals, the ease in which she did so led to doping suspicions in Western media. Analysis of 222 articles from the US and China revealed sharp differences […]
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True Fan = Watch Match?: In Search of the ‘Authentic’ Soccer Fan
Academics have created typologies to divide association football (soccer) fans into categories based upon the ‘authenticity’ of their fandom practices. One of the main requirements of ‘authentic’ fandom has been assumed to be match attendance. The goal of this paper was to critically assess this assumption by considering how fans themselves talk about the significance […]
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Vanilla Thrillas: Modern Boxing and White-Ethnic Masculinity
From 2002 to 2004, Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward fought three boxing matches. The Ward—Gatti bouts produced a discourse that was never monolithic and oftentimes contradictory, yet many fight fans and journalists asserted that the match-ups hearkened back to a time when “White-ethnic” fighters ruled the ring. The manner in which these contests captured the […]
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We Have to Establish Our Territory: How Women Surfers ‘Carve Out’ Gendered Spaces Within Surfing
This Research Insight piece examines how southern California recreational women surfers experience, cope with and contest their marginalized status within the male-dominated sport of surfing. Drawing on literature that focuses on women in alternative sports, I argue that women surfers face similar contradictions, such as developing strategies to cope with and contest their marginalized status […]
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What Makes a Woman a Woman? Versus Our First Lady of Sport: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and the South African Media Coverage of Caster Semenya
Caster Semenya, a South African female track and field star from rural Limpopo South Africa, won the IAAF 2009 World Championships in the 800-meter event. She was then subjected to “gender-verification” testing. Media reports, especially in the United States, underscored that Semenya underwent gender-verification testing because of her “deep voice, muscular build, and rapid improvement […]
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A Puritan Sunday Baseball and Blue Laws In Walla Walla, Washington
A new wave of immigrants brought with them the Continental Sunday when they arrived at Ellis Island. According to McCrossen, “Sundays were especially busy in [immigrant communities], for it was then that entire families went to drink beer, visit with friends, listen to music, and dance, just as German and others did in Europe. Walla […]
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Aren’t you a Little Short to Play Ball?: Japanese American Youth and Racial Microaggressions in Basketball Leagues”
In February 2012, Jeremy Lin was taken off the bench and put in the game after several starters for the New York Knicks were injured. Much to the surprise of the media and basketball fans alike, Lin went on to have a string of successful games in which he broke numerous scoring records. The birth […]
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By the Skaters, for the Skaters: The DIY Ethos of the Roller Derby Revival
The growth of women’s roller derby has been driven by the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic. This means the majority of roller derby leagues are owned and operated by the participants. Drawing on an ethnographic study of three leagues, the author argues that the DIY ethos is not simply motivated by necessity; rollergirls consider it an important […]
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Cycles of Change: Slaying the Badger, the Tour de France and Contemporary Documentary Film
From its origins in 1903 as a parochial national cycle race, the Tour de France is today undeniably among the greatest annual sporting spectacles in the world. Since 1954 it has systematically extended its appeal beyond France’s national borders, regularly staging a grand départ from other European cities. The Tour de France also attracts an […]
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Drunk and Proud: From the Streets to the Stands: America Football Club Fans, Aguante and Alcohol Consumption in Mexican Football Fandom
An ethnographic description of a typical match day of Ritual del Kaos barra fans provides elements to discuss the consumption of alcohol as a specific practice of aguante. For the young Mexican-organized supporters of professional football clubs the concept of aguante has become the key concept for their daily practices. America Football Club fans of […]
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Either Everyone was Guilty or Everyone was Innocent: The Italian Power Elite, Neopatrimonialism, and the Importance of Social Relations
Rarely does the Byzantine world of football administration get exposed as clearly as during the 2006 calciopoli scandal. This scandal laid bare the interpersonal relationships of football administrators at the top three Italian men’s football clubs: Juventus, Inter, and AC Milan. This article draws on the media leaks that revealed the inner workings of those […]
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“Fat” Chicks Who Run: Stigma Experienced by “Overweight” Endurance Athletes
Research on “overweight” and “obese” populations is extensive, but little of this research specifically addresses the “obese” or “overweight” amateur endurance athlete. Amateur endurance athletes often have bodies that defy the stereotype of the typical marathoner, swimmer, or triathlete. As a result, these athletes can experience stigma, both within their sporting communities as well as […]
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Foreign Locals: Transnationalism, Expatriates, and Surfer Identity in Costa Rica
Surfer identity construction has been linked to a number of factors, including a strong attachment to place. Surfers have always been a mobile population, and the search for waves in new places is a central aspect of the sport. The movement of surfers has led to the development of transnational communities in surf destinations. This […]
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From Fizzle to Sizzle!: Televised Sports News and the Production of Gender-Bland Sexism
This article draws upon data collected as part of a 25-year longitudinal analysis of televised coverage of women’s sports to provide a window into how sexism operates during a postfeminist sociohistorical moment. As the gender order has shifted to incorporate girls’ and women’s movement into the masculine realm of sports, coverage of women’s sports has […]
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Hands Up, Don’t Shoot or Shut Up and Play Ball?: Fan-Generated Media Views of the Ferguson Five
This article explores the intersection of sports and social activism in the wake of the police-involved death of Michael Brown. Traditionally, professional athletes have remained silent, or at the very best color-blind, regarding domestic social issues. It is customary for sports celebrities such as Michael Jordan to avoid compromising their status in the marketplace with […]
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Here’s Hoping We get Pummeled: Anti-Nationalist Trends Among Israeli Sports Fans
This study discusses changes in football fans’ perception of nationalism in recent years. A growing number of athletes, fans, and sports teams have been explicitly prioritizing their own particular individual interests over national ones. National football teams nowadays enjoy far less support from their fans, whose allegiances are often multiple and who, at times, even […]
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I Am Not a Cow: Challenging Narratives of Empowerment in Teen Girls Sports Fiction
This research examines two popular teen girls sports fiction series, called “Pretty Tough” and “Dairy Queen.” The books are heavily premised on the idea of empowerment, and are written in ways that invite the reader to see each protagonist’s choices as agentic and even subversive. Our analysis points to the ways the discourse of empowerment […]
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The Day the Flame Came to Town: The Olympic Flame, Symbol, Community and Commodification
Debates regarding the Olympic Flame Relay oscillate between questions concerning the symbolic value of the Relay and the commodified nature of the Games more generally. While some argue for the potential intercultural understanding that the Flame Relay fosters, others point to the extent to which Olympism is embedded within the practices of commercial companies. Research […]
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There is Loads of Relationships Here: Developing a Programme Theory for Sport-for-Change Programs
This article reports on research on the effectiveness of sports-based interventions that sought to address issues of gang membership, racism, at-risk youth and a rather ill-defined notion of ‘conflict’. The article illustrates the varying centrality of sport in such programmes, reports on a series of in-depth interviews with participants in four programmes, exploring the nature […]
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There was Something That Wasn’t Right Because That was the Only Place I Ever Got Treated Like That: Children and Young People’s Experiences of Emotional Harm in Sport
The article reports findings from a study of negative and harmful experiences of children participating in organised sport in the UK focusing in particular on emotional harm. A convenience sample of 6124 young people (age 18–22) completed an online survey about their experiences of sport as children (up to age 16); 89 follow-up telephone interviews […]
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There’s Just Something About This Club. It’s Been My Family: An Analysis of the Experiences of Youth in a South African Sport-for-development Program
This article describes a study of a soccer and life skills programme for youth in South Africa: Buffalo City Soccer School (BCSS). The study aimed to provide insight into the programme’s mechanisms, and evaluate participants’ perceptions of the programme’s impact. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 male BCSS participants. Interview data were analysed for […]
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This is Men’s Ultimate: (Re)creating Multiple Masculinities in Elite Open Ultimate Frisbee
Over the past 10 years, there has been an increasing focus on the complexity and diversity of masculinities produced in sporting contexts. In this article, I draw on Foucauldian notions of power and discourse to examine the performances of elite male Ultimate players. Based on a year-long ethnographic study with an elite male Ultimate team, […]
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This Might be Him; The Guy I’m Gonna Marry: Love and Sexual Relationships Between Female Elite-Athletes and Male Coaches
Infatuation, love and sexual relationships exist virtually anywhere. Coach–athlete sexual relationships (CASR), however, are overlooked and under-researched. Within sport sociology, CASR have been framed predominantly by a sexual abuse discourse. Informed by Foucault’s discourse analysis, this study explores how discourses regarding performance enhancement in elite-sport and coaching, and romantic love, frame female elite-athletes’ experiences with […]
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Tidy, Toned and Fit: Locating Healthism Within Elite Athlete programs
Coaches and athletes have been increasingly inundated with power related ‘truths’ about their bodies, health and performance as they construct their subjectivities. Over the last couple of decades in New Zealand, schools have initiated elite athlete programmes (EAPs) for a select few students based primarily on their athletic ability and fitness levels. Drawing on Gore’s […]
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Today you are Not a White Man, You are a Black Man: Inauthentic Whiteness in Johannesburg Football Fandom
While whiteness studies often begin from the assumption that being ‘white’ means having access to an unspoken centre of power, the third wave of whiteness studies focuses on nuanced forms of whiteness. In the post-apartheid context, various discursive strategies are employed by South African whites to retain privilege. Yet whiteness is also constructed spatially. Through […]
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Unified Gives Us a Chance: An Evaluation of Special Olympics Youth Unified Sports Programs in Europe/Eurasia
The University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, in partnership with Special Olympics Europe Eurasia has conducted an evaluation of the Special Olympics Youth Unified Sports programme. Working in five countries across Europe this evaluation carried out over two hundred qualitative interviews and gathered data on fifty-five Unified teams. The evaluation examined the Unified model as […]
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We Don’t Need No Stinking Smartphones!: Live Stadium Sports Events, Mediatization, and the Non-Use of Mobile Media
The continuing institutional interpenetration of the sports, media, and digital technology industries makes professional sports an unlikely setting for protest against the use of media. Yet, major stadiums and arenas are serving as sites where the deepening reach and influence of media in lived social and cultural experiences are reflected upon and debated. Drawing upon […]
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We’ve Got Team Spirit!: Ethnic Community Building and Japanese American Youth Basketball Leagues
This article examines the role co-ethnic youth basketball leagues play in shaping ethnic community among third- and fourth-generation Japanese American youth. With dwindling rates of Japanese immigration, increased rates of out-marriage, and fewer cultural hubs available, finding a thriving ethnic community has become a particular challenge for later-generation Japanese Americans. Drawing from ethnographic data, I […]
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We’re, Like, a Cute Rugby Team: How Whiteness and Heterosexuality Shape Women’s Sense of Belonging in Rugby
This article considers how race and sexuality mutually inform the ways women experience their sense of belonging in sport. An examination of how white and heterosexual privilege structure belonging for 15 women rugby players in the sport finds that the ways in which some players assert their belonging runs the risk of reifying oppressive norms […]
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When You’re Boxing You Don’t Think So Much: Pugilism, Transitional Masculinities and Criminal Desistance Among Young Danish Gang Members
This paper draws upon international research evidence that suggests a relationship between protest masculinity and the manifestation of violent crime among young males, and that criminal desistance may be linked to (inter-) subjective processes such as the reconstruction of masculine identity. The paper considers the potential that pugilism (the art and practice of boxing) may […]
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Who Do ‘‘They” Cheer For?: Cricket, Diaspora, Hybridity and Divided Loyalties Amongst British Asians
This article explores the relationship between British Asians’ sense of nationhood, citizenship, ethnicity and some of their manifestations in relation to sports fandom: specifically in terms of how cricket is used as a means of articulating diasporic British Asian identities. Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ is at the forefront of this article to tease out the […]
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Wushu Belongs to the World: But the Gold Goes to China…: The International Development of the Chinese Martial Arts
Since the mid-1980s, China has been promoting wushu(also known as kung fu) as an international competitive sport towards Olympic recognition. But despite the efforts of the International Wushu Federation, to date, wushu has not entered the Olympics. Data were collected of countries’ medal-winning performances at the World Wushu Championships since 1991. The findings of this […]
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You Can’t be too Vain to Gain if you Want to Swim the Channel: Marathon Swimming and the Construction of Heroic Fatness
The fat body and the sporting body are conventionally understood as mutually exclusive, coming together only in sport-based weight-loss interventions. However, the sport of marathon swimming relies upon body fat as a performance advantage, and weight maintenance and gain are a common element of the training process. The concept of ‘heroic fatness’ offers (some) swimmers […]
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Cause It’s Family Talking to you: Children Acting as Change Agents for Adult Food and Physical Activity Behaviors in American Indian Households in the Upper Midwestern United States
This article presents research findings from the formative phase of OPREVENT, a pilot obesity prevention intervention trial for American Indian households on two reservations in the Upper Midwestern United States. We describe processes by which American Indian children acting as change agents influence adult food and physical activity behaviors on an Ojibwa and a Potawatomi […]
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Baseball is Whack!: Exploring the Lack of African American Baseball Consumption
The purpose of this study is to assess the African American viewpoint on baseball consumption. Utilizing a criterion purposive sample of African Americans, the authors used a qualitative analysis to obtain viewpoints that provide a rich understanding of the motivations to consume (or not consume) baseball. Likewise, the authors investigated the facets of baseball that […]
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How Much is too Much? The Social Construction of Elite Youth Athlete Exercise Tolerances From the Coaches’ Perspective
Coaches are key actors in youth elite sport. As such, they are regularly confronted with professional problems that are both complex and highly consequential. Herein, we address one fundamental coaching problem: the definition of athletes’ exercise tolerance levels. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge, we focus on coaches’ conceptions of exercise tolerance and the sociocultural […]
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If a Woman Came in … She Would Have Been Eaten up Alive: Analyzing Gendered Political Processes in the Search For an Athletic Director
The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand and critique the gendered political processes in the search for an athletic director following a merger between men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletic departments in a U.S. university. Semi-structured interviews were used to ask 55 athletic department stakeholders their perceptions of the search process and associated […]
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Women Bloggers: Identity and the Conceptualization of Sports.
With the emergence of the blogosphere, women have gained a unique opportunity to share their experiences. This study explored the formation of self and the conceptualization of sports in the “Sports Blog” directory of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. A content analysis of 449 profiles in the directory revealed that women bloggers tend to use […]
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Women Play Sport, but not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media
One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the media simply provide fans with what they “want to see” (i.e., men’s sports). Using quantitative […]
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Women, Social Media, and Sport: Global Digital Communication Weaves a Web
Globally, the digital media has played a key role in generating attention, creating controversy and showcasing changes in media coverage of women’s sports. Social media have made sports coverage an interpersonal, intercultural and international public domain. For the news media, however, the values used to cover and construct representation women athletes and women’s sports have […]
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Women’s Experiences in eSports: Gendered Differences in Peer and Spectator Feedback During Competitive Video Game Play
Despite the growing popularity of eSports, the poor representation of women players points to a need to understand the experiences of female players during competitive gaming online. The present study focuses on female gamers’ experiences with positive and negative feedback and sexual harassment in the male-dominated space of eSports. In Study 1, gender differences were […]
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Women’s Experiences in the Mixed Martial Arts: A Quest for Excitement?
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), like the majority of relatively violent sports, has mainly been organized around the capabilities of the male body. However various indices suggest that women’s engagement with MMA is growing. The purpose of this paper is to offer an analysis of women’s involvement in MMA using a figurational sociological approach. In doing […]
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Women’s Ski Jumping, the 2010 Olympic Games, and the Deafening Silence of Sex Segregation, Whiteness, and Wealth
Citing section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 15 women’s ski jumpers took the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) to court over the exclusion of a women’s ski jumping event. In this analysis of the initial court case and subsequent appeal, I demonstrate that Canadian […]
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Wonderlic, Race, and the NFL Draft
Extending the work of Berri and Simmons on the National Football League (NFL) player draft and the Scouting Combine, the authors use the Wonderlic cognitive ability test to test one implication of a simple Phelps model of statistical discrimination in the NFL draft. The authors treat Wonderlic scores as a noisy signal of a player’s […]
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World Cup 2010: Africa’s Turn or the Turn on Africa?
The awarding of World Cup 2010 to South Africa was hailed as a great ‘victory’ for the African continent and the cause of much celebration. It heightened expectations not only about the spectacle itself but about the benefits that would accrue to South Africa and the rest of Africa. This essay examines the notion of […]
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World Cup 2022 and Qatar’s Construction Projects: Relational Power in Networks and Relational Responsibilities to Migrant Workers
This article explores the relational power and responsibilities to migrant workers on physical infrastructure projects in Qatar connected to the sovereign state hosting the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2022. Currently, these construction workers operate under the Kafala system, which is upheld in Qatar. However, large numbers of Qatar’s visiting migrant construction […]
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World Stadium Index: Stadiums Built for Major Sporting Events – Bright Future or Future Burden?
This report from the Danish Institute for Sports Studies/Play the Game has the objective to obtain a greater understanding of the sporting legacy of stadiums built for or having undergone major renovations to host a major international sporting event. Several brand new stadiums have been built or renovated for specific events, but the legacy of […]
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Young People’s Experiences of Parental Involvement in Youth Sport
Recently parental involvement in youth sport has intensified, challenging the understanding of youth sports as an arena where adolescents can develop their identity and autonomy. On this background, our study explores how adolescents understand and negotiate their parents’ involvement in sport and how they define ideal and undesirable forms of parental involvement. Our empirical setting […]
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Youth Action Sports and Political Agency in the Middle East: Lessons from a Grassroots Parkour Group in Gaza
In this paper we build upon recent scholarship on the globalization of youth culture and sport to examine the growing popularity of action sports in the Middle East. We focus on the development of the urban physical practice of parkour (also known as free running)—the act of running, jumping, leaping through an urban environment as […]
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Youth Athletes, Bodies and Gender: Gender Constructions in Textbooks Used in Coaching Education Programmes in Sweden
This paper is based on analysis of ideas about girls and boys in sports as they are presented in textbooks used in coaching education programmes in Sweden. Specifically, it explores gender in relation to descriptions of girls’ and boys’ bodies and bodily development during puberty. Texts construct gender differences. Masculinity is shaped around being an […]
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Youth Football Participation Dropping
The growing mound of research on the dangers of brain trauma in sports — especially when it comes to the young developing brain — has resulted in many parents deciding to not allow their children to play tackle football. According to a recent report from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the number of kids, […]
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Youth Team, League, and Tournament Sports: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2018 to 2024.
Radiant Insights has announced the addition of “Youth Team, League and Tournament Sports: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2018 to 2024” Market Research report to their database. Worldwide $22 billion youth sports markets are poised to achieve significant growth as travel teams become more popular and families learn to enjoy time together during a […]
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Youths with Migration Backgrounds and Their Experiences of Physical Education: An Examination of three Cases
While understanding young people has never been easy, migration trends make it increasingly difficult. Many classrooms have become culturally heterogeneous and teachers are often faced with pupils with diverse linguistic and cultural heritages. Current scholarship suggests that as a discipline, physical education has not adapted to this diversity. In fact, commentators have suggested that physical […]
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Silver Cups Versus Ice Creams: Parental Involvement with the Construction of Gender in the Field of Their Son’s Soccer
This study explores parents’ gendered meanings in their involvement with their son’s soccer participation. We use Bourdieu’s (1985; 1990; 2012) theoretical perspective of fields, positions, habitus and taking positions to examine the way in which parents in two Dutch soccer clubs reconstruct and negotiate gendered meanings through expressions, positioning and power relations within the field […]
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