Research Library

Review of The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age

Globalisation has had a profound impact on European football and English football in particular. A series of political and economic transformations took place in the 1990s which reflected wider global transformations outside of the sport. Clubs sought additional funding from…

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Rethinking Identity Politics: The Multiple Attachments of an ‘Exclusive’ Sport Organization

This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnography of the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament and examines the attachments and relationships that participation nurtures. I argue that rather than being exclusive, the NACIVT and its participants foster and nurture multiple…

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Resisting the World-Class City: Community Opposition and the Politics of a Local Arena Development

While the public subsidy of major league sport franchises and associated urban development projects remains wildly popular in some constituencies, these expenditures have, increasingly, been met with organized resistance. This article examines the formation of Voices for Democracy (VFD)—a grassroots…

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Representing Taiwan: International Sport, Ethnicity and National Identity in the Republic of China

This article outlines and analysis the political character of Taiwan’s relationship with international sport, and in particular with the Olympic movement. In so doing, it seeks to add to the understanding of the links between sport and the formation and…

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Relationship Between Spiritual Transcendence and Competitive Anxiety in Male Athletes

The purpose of this study was the relationship between spiritual transcendence and competitive anxiety in athletes. For this field, 400 of men athletes in Kermanshah city by stratified sampling were selected and completed the spiritual transcendence and competitive anxiety scales.…

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Reflections on communication and sport: On fanship and social relationships.

In this essay, Walter Gantz reflects on the importance of communication and sport and the evolution of his research on fanship and social relationships. Cutting across two overlapping dimensions—physical location and technology—this essay characterizes key ways that sports fanship may…

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Redefining Disability, Re-imagining the Self: Disability Identification Predicts Self-esteem and Strategic Responses to Stigma

People cope with stigma via individualistic strategies that minimize stigmatized attributes, and collective strategies that positively redefine stigmatized traits. Guided by social identity theory, we surveyed people with hidden and visible disabilities to investigate the association between disability identification and…

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Reconstructing the Community-Based Youth Sport Experience: How Children Derive Meaning from Unstructured and Organized Settings

Youth sport participation often provides the most salient forum for connecting sport with local communities. In this phenomenological examination of preteen youth sport participants, we consider the experiences and attendant meanings derived from participation in both organized and unstructured youth…

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Reactions to Implementing Adventure-based Learning in Physical Education

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the reactions of 13 pre-service teachers (PTs) implementing an adventure-based learning (ABL) unit through the lens of occupational socialization. Data were collected through interviews, critical reflections and reflection of videotaped ABL…

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Re-placing Sport Migrants: Moving Beyond the Institutional Structures Informing International Sport Migration

Interest in international sport migration has been burgeoning recently. This article considers the dominant theoretical models used to explore these movements and suggests that it is time to rethink some of our theoretical presumptions. Recent permutations of these theoretical models,…

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Re-Immersing into Elite Swimming Culture: A Meta-Autoethnography by a Former Elite Swimmer

This paper presents two meta-autoethnographies written by a former elite swimmer. In the first meta autoethnography, the swimmer revealed doubts in relation to details, emotions and inner-thoughts that she had included in her historical autoethnographic work. As a means of…

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Rationales Rhetoric and Realities: FIFA’s World Cup in South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014

The 2010 FIFA World Cup was heralded by mainstream media outlets, the local organisers, the South African government and FIFA as an unequivocal success. The month-long spectacle saw South Africa Take centre stage and host the world’s largest single sporting…

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Radical Sports Journalism?: Reflections on ‘Alternative’ Approaches to Covering Sport-Related Social Issues

In this paper we report findings from a study of what we are calling ‘sports media activism’ (or ‘SMA’). We were interested in how, why, and for what purposes a range of sport media activists are engaging with sport-related social…

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Racism, Football Fans, and Online Message Boards: How Social Media Has Added a New Dimension to Racist Discourse in English Football

This article presents the findings of a discourse analysis carried out from November 2011 to February 2012 on two prominent association football (soccer) message boards that examined fans’ views toward racism in English football. After analyzing more than 500 posts,…

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Race sport and social support: A comparison between African American and White youths’ perceptions of social support for sport participation

There is a substantial theoretical literature arguing that African American families, more than other ethnic groups, push their children towards sports. However, there is a dearth of generalizable empirical research examining whether African American families do in fact encourage their…

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Put on the wig it’s time to ball: Experiences of a collegiate men’s basketball fan group

The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of a collegiate men’s basketball fan group. Little research has been undertaken exploring student fan groups, especially using ethnographic methods. The primary researcher attended two men’s home basketball games at…

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Public policies, body practices and social representations on ageing. A case study: the national sports plan and the sports games , Buenos Aires Province

In this paper we present the ideas of a number of speeches from which public policies have been designing and implementing that have embodied body practices (related to sport) with seniors and who build a particular social representation of ageing.…

Read OnPublic policies, body practices and social representations on ageing. A case study: the national sports plan and the sports games , Buenos Aires Province

Protecting the NFL/ militarizing the homeland: Citizen soldiers and urban resilience in post-9/11 America

In this article I focus on intersections between the National Football League’s (NFL) security practices and the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) counter-terrorism agenda, including new policies and legal structures that support pre-emption, protection, and preparation activities that manage…

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Promoting the ‘arriviste’ city: Producing neoliberal urban identity and communities of consumption during the Edmonton Oilers’ 2006 playoff campaign

In the spring of 2006, the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers made a surprise run to the Stanley Cup final for the first time in 16 years. Predictably, hockey fans and media pundits responded enthusiastically to the one-time return…

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Promoting Buddhism through Modern Sports: The Case Study of Fo Guang Shan in Taiwan

In the past, traditional Buddhism in China focused on chanting and meditation that detached itself from the society. However, after generations of strenuous efforts to promote ‘Humanistic Buddhism’, several Masters have been encouraging religion to engage more in daily lives.…

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Profile of self-reported problems with executive functioning in college and professional football players

Repetitive mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), such as that experienced by contact-sport athletes, has been associated with the development of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Executive dysfunction is believed to be among the earliest symptoms of CTE, with these symptoms presenting…

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Professional habitus and the construction of gender: The case of male journalists for sports magazines in France.

This article analyzes the role of male journalists in the construction of gender models in the specialized mountain bike press. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s field and habitus theory, it shows that the masculine and feminine media figures are mainly dependent on…

Read OnProfessional habitus and the construction of gender: The case of male journalists for sports magazines in France.

Professional golf—a license to spend money? Issues of money in the lives of touring professional golfers.

Drawing on figurational sociology, this article examines issues of money that are central to touring professional golfers’ workplace experiences. Based on interviews with 16 professionals, results indicate the monetary rewards available for top golfers continues to increase; however, such recompense…

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Producing mobility through locality and visibility: Developing a transnational perspective on sports labour migration.

To date, studies of sports labour migration have afforded little attention to analysis of how individual athletes relate to historical and macro- structural power relations and forces. In this article, we set out to develop a transnational perspective on sports…

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Problematizing Foucauldian ethics: A review of technologies of the self in sociology of sport since 2003.

Foucault’s technologies of the self have been used by sociological scholars of sport for nearly two decades. Yet Markula’s seminal articulation of a feminist Foucauldian ethics in 2003 stands as a watershed publication, insofar as the majority of publications following…

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Preschoolers’ perceptions of their mothers’ and fathers’ reactions to injury-risk behavior.

Seventy-eight 3 year-old children participated in structured interviews. Boys reported wanting to engage in higher levels of risk than did girls. Children viewed mothers as allowing boys and girls to engage in similar levels of risk. Conversely, they viewed fathers…

Read OnPreschoolers’ perceptions of their mothers’ and fathers’ reactions to injury-risk behavior.

Prejudice against lesbian, gay, and bisexual coaches: The influence of race, religious fundamentalism, modern sexism, and contact with sexual minorities.

In drawing from Herek’s (2007, 2009) sexual stigma and prejudice theory, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among prejudice toward sexual minority coaches, religious fundamentalism, sexism, and sexual prejudice and to determine whether race affected these…

Read OnPrejudice against lesbian, gay, and bisexual coaches: The influence of race, religious fundamentalism, modern sexism, and contact with sexual minorities.

Predisposed to participate? The influence of family socio-economic background on children’s sports participation and daily amount of physical activity

From a Bourdieu-inspired understanding of how personal resources (‘capitals’) enable certain practices in certain contexts, the links between families’ cultural, social and economic capitals, and children’s daily physical activity were investigated in 500 suburban Danish schoolchildren using questionnaire data and…

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Power plays and Olympic divisions: Bilingualism and the politics of Canadian viewing rights at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

There have been innumerable political debates around the world over the distribution of live sporting events in the digital era. Typically, these deliberations involve competing claims and interests associated with sport, commerce, cultural and broadcasting policies, and, at times, language…

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Poor Teaching by the Coach: A Phenomenological Description from Athletes’ Experience of Poor Coaching

Background: Winning and losing have consistently been used as one criterion upon which to evaluate coaches. Since winning coaches have long been thought of as knowledgeable and effective at providing instruction, researchers have often studied coaches who have obtained a…

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Political correctness, selection bias, and the NCAA Basketball Tournament

Allegations of selection bias toward the major conferences and teams with committee representation have previously been levied on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Basketball tournament selection committee. We illustrate the source of this bias is political correctness. When using…

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Plotting a Paralympic field: An elite disability sport competition viewed through Bourdieu’s sociological lens

In this paper components of Bourdieu’s sociological theory will be utilized to systematically outline key constituents, and the interrelated power struggles, which shape Paralympic sport. The premier Paralympic sport competition is arguably the summer Paralympic Games, a quadrennial multi-sport competition…

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Playing with the big boys: Basketball, American imperialism, and subaltern discourse in the Philippines

The global diffusion of sport is both a complex topic and a thematic presence in sport history and sociology circles. Studies of colonialism, human geography, and cultural appropriation are just a few of the channels to the international dissemination of…

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Playing with the autoethnographical: Performing and re-presenting the fan’s voice

My article plays with notions of performativity and representation to repudiate assumptions of one-dimensional fandom. In particular, due to its self-reflexive writing style, I argue that autoethnography can articulate and show the subject-fan voice through evocations of first-person, insider experiences.…

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Playing through differences: black–white racial logic and interrogating South Asian American identity

This article examines how South Asian American communities ascribe meaning to the category of ‘race’ while adding their own sensibilities to racial categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. Drawing upon ethnographic methods, I analyse leisure spaces of basketball to demonstrate how…

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Playing like a girl? The negotiation of gender and sexual identity among female ice hockey athletes on male teams.

While no one can deny the rich history of girls and women in sport, they continue to face obstacles to their full participation and representation in mixed-sex sport environments. Sex integration in sport is often contentious for those female athletes…

Read OnPlaying like a girl? The negotiation of gender and sexual identity among female ice hockey athletes on male teams.

Playing in the New Media Game or Riding the Virtual Bench: Confirming and Disconfirming Membership in the Community of Sport

This essay explores a set of new media user trends that are (re)shaping fan–athlete interaction through (para)social connections. Acting as bonding agents, the trends considered either contribute to or detract from membership in the community of sport. Accordingly, social leveling…

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Players’ perspectives on the positive impact of video games: A qualitative content analysis of online forum discussions

On game forums, players often discuss the positive impact of video games on their lives. We collected 964 messages from top ranked game forums (via Alexa.com) and analyzed them using a coding scheme based on an existing taxonomy about the…

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Place disparities in supportive environments for extracurricular physical activity in North Carolina middle schools.

Disadvantaged rural youth may be especially at risk for obesity and poorer health due to physical inactivity. Research suggests that extracurricular school programs can increase physical activity for this population. This study sought to determine whether local differences existed in…

Read OnPlace disparities in supportive environments for extracurricular physical activity in North Carolina middle schools.