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Physical Cultural Studies: Engendering a Productive Dialogue
One is never quite sure what the response will be to a special issue call for papers. Certainly, that was the case with regard to this Physical Cultural Studies special issue of the Sociology of Sport Journal. As editors, our…
Physical and sports activities, and healthy and active ageing: Establishing a frame of reference for public action.
Since the 1960s, there has been a change in the portrayal of older people. This change has resulted in the promotion of an active way of life that led, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to the development by…
Physical activity experiences of young people in an area of disadvantage: ‘There’s nothing there for big kids, like us’
Through an examination of the experiences of young people in one disadvantaged area, this paper adds to an emerging body of knowledge focused on what place physical activity occupies in the lives of young people in areas of disadvantage. A…
Perspectives of Mentoring: The Black Female Student-Athlete
The purpose of this study was to understand Black female collegiate athletes’ perception of mentors and the characteristics of their current mentors. Understanding their definition of a mentor and the persons whom fulfill the psychosocial and career mentor roles will…
Personal strategies for managing a second career: The experiences of Spanish Olympians
The purpose of this study was to examine how Olympians experience the transition to a second career, to identify the strategies they may or may not implement in order to prepare for it, and to determine the main factors that…
Perpetuating the “lack of evidence” discourse in sport for development: Privileged voices, unheard stories and subjugated knowledge
Through an examination of the power relations embedded in the international movement of sport for development, we consider the dominant ‘lack of evidence’ discourse, which calls for more rigorous, scientific proof to validate the sport for development field. We argue…
Performance level and sexual harassment prevalence among female athletes in the Czech Republic.
This article investigates whether there is a relationship between the sport performance level of female athletes inside the sport (at clubs, competitions, or training events) and outside sport (in family or community settings) and the likelihood that they will be…
Perception or reality: The relationship between stereotypes, discrimination, and the academic outcomes of African American male college athletes.
The current study examined the degree to which stereotypes and racial discrimination affected the academic outcomes of African American male college athletes. Furthermore, the ability of athletic identity and racial identity to moderate this relationship was examined. Participants (N =…
Perceiving Penn State: The formative role of interpersonal discussion in third-person perceptions in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal.
We examine the role of interpersonal discussion in an attempt to better understand talk’s contribution to perceived media impacts related to the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State University. Through the use of a survey conducted both in the state…
Perceived environmental church support and physical activity black church members.
Background. Churches are an appealing setting for implementing health-related behavior change programs. Purpose. The objective of the study was to examine the relationship between perceived environmental church support for physical activity (PA) and PA behaviors. Method. Black church members from…
Perceived coach-autonomy support, basic need satisfaction and the well- and ill-being of elite youth soccer players: A longitudinal investigation
Objectives: Drawing from the basic needs theory [BNT; Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2002). An overview of self-determination theory. In E. L. Deci, & R. M. Ryan (Eds.), Handbook of self-determination research (pp. 3e33). Rochester, NY: University of…
People Have a Knack of Making You Feel Excluded if They Catch onto Your Difference: Transgender Experiences of Exclusion in Sport
While there is a growing literature in the field of gender, sexuality and sport, there is a dearth of research into the lived experiences of transgender people in sport. The present study addresses this research gap by exploring and analysing…
Peddling sport: liberal multiculturalism and the racial triangulation of blackness, Chineseness and Native American-ness in professional basketball
Deploying liberal multiculturalist discourse, the media depicts professional basketball as a post-racial space where all talented players, regardless of their race, can thrive if they work hard. An analysis of the construction of non-white players in the 1930s and in…
Pay discrimination, exit discrimination or both? Another look at an old issue using NBA data.
Economic literature has identified two potential types of racial discrimination in sports careers: exit discrimination and wage discrimination. The authors test for both types of discrimination in National Basketball Association (NBA) data in two ways. First using a modified Heckman…
Pawns or power players: The grounds on which adults dismiss or defend youth organizers in the USA.
Over the last two decades, youth organizing has emerged as an important strategy for social change, particularly within education policy; however, the ability of youth to influence policy is limited by the tendency of adults in positions of power to…
Passing to India: A critique of American football’s expansion
Although India has long held a passion for cricket, an organization called the Elite Football League of India(EFLI) is looking to disrupt that sporting nerve center, and introduce the foreign sport of American football to the country’s growing middle class.…
Parenting in relation to children’s sports participation: generational changes and potential implications
This paper presents data on the parenting practices and perceptions of middle-class parents in the domain of children’s sport. Adopting a grounded-theory approach, the data were generated through 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with parents and children from eight different families.…
Parenting and motocross: The whoops and downs.
Many studies address the influences of parenting and contextual factors on child development (Belsky, 1984). Although long-term contextual factors such as poverty and abuse have been shown to be associated with both parent and child behaviors (La Placa & Corlyon,…
Parent–Child Interactions and Objectively Measured Child Physical Activity: A Cross Sectional Study
Parents influence their children’s behaviors directly through specific parenting practices and indirectly through their parenting style. Some practices such as logistical and emotional support have been shown to be positively associated with child physical activity (PA) levels, while for others…
Parent–child injury prevention conversations following a trip to the emergency department
The goal of the study was to examine how parents use conversation to promote the internalization of safety values after their child has been seriously injured. Parent interviews detailing postinjury conversations were coded for strategies mentioned to prevent injuries in…
Parent-child interactions and objectively measured child physical activity: a cross-sectional study
Parents influence their children’s behaviors directly through specific parenting practices and indirectly through their parenting style. Some practices such as logistical and emotional support have been shown to be positively associated with child physical activity (PA) levels, while for others…
Paralympics and Its Athletes Through the Lens of the New York Times
The purpose of this article is to analyze the coverage of the Paralympics in the New York Times (NYT) from the first appearance of the term Paralympics in 1955 up to 2012. We analyzed a) the textual imagery (not imagery…
Paralympics 2012 legacy: accessible housing and disability equality or inequality?
The golden summer of sport is now over, but what is the legacy of London 2012 for disabled people? Nadia Ahmed, a disabled student, discusses the difficulties she has faced in finding accessible accommodation in London. She argues that while…
Paralympians Outperforming Olympians: An Increasing Challenge for Olympism and the Paralympic and Olympic Movement
Non-therapeutic performance enhancement in sport is a contentious issue for some time but the issue of therapeutic enhancements has only recently entered the sport vernacular. The purpose of therapeutic assistive devices so far is widely seen as lifting as impaired…
Paradoxes of the flesh: Emotion and contradiction in fitness/beauty magazine discourse.
Analyzing women’s fitness/beauty magazines for advice on diet and exercise reveals a range of contradictions, the focus of this research. Contradictory diet and fitness discourses signify our culture’s paradoxical expectations for women’s bodies, ensuring that virtually no woman can measure…
Own-race bias among NBA coaches
This article finds that National Basketball Association (NBA) coaches gave greater minutes per game to players of their own race during the 1996-2004 seasons after controlling for player quality using performance statistics and player fixed effects. The authors estimate that…
Overview of university sport in Iran
This article focuses on the structure and management systems of sport at Iranian universities. The method of this research was through an analysis of documents. Sport in the system of Iranian universities is divided into three different categories. The physical…
Overriding concerns: Developing safe relations in the high-risk interspecies sport of eventing
Equestrian sports are unavoidably interspecies and undeniably dangerous. Whilst there has been qualitative research into the human–horse relationship, and quantitative research into horse riding, injury and risk, there remains a need to understand how risk perception and experience is subjectively…
Overexposed: Capturing a secret side of sports photography.
Accredited photographers have been observed taking sexualized, voyeuristic images of athletes that are later distributed on pornography websites and among collectors of pornographic images. As with other emergent forms of digital voyeurism, such as upskirting, these images are taken in…
Overcoming respondent resistance at elite interviews using an intermediary
This article promotes an interviewing technique that could be used when interviewing elite policy-making respondents who fear repercussions for divulging information and who, as a result, either become too emotionally unstable to allow for rapport or begin to resist disclosing…
Outside Horses, Inside Men: Equestrian Sport, Disability, and Theology
Equestrian sport is unique in many ways among the sporting disciplines, but is rarely inspected by theologians. The author undertakes one of the first studies of Christian theology, disability, and equestrian sports. She considers four themes (interdependence, vulnerability, mutual enabling,…
Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball
This book explores the many-faceted relationship between Jews and black baseball in Jim Crow America. Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews called the Belleville Grays—the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball—made their…
Out in Sport: The experiences of openly gay and lesbian athletes in competitive sport
Research has shown that since the turn of the millennia, matters have rapidly improved for gays and lesbians in sport. Where gay and lesbian athletes were merely tolerated a decade ago, today they are celebrated. This book represents the most…
Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport: Did They Teach Us About That in Medical School?
There was a startling press conference attended by the Australian Minister for Justice, the Minister for Sport, the Chief Executive Officer of Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) and the leaders of the major sporting codes in Australia. High-performance sporting organisations,…
Organised activities, educational activities and family activities: how do they feature in the middle-class family’s weekend?
In the context of concerns regarding work-life balance, questions have been raised in relation to the weekend and whether it is being ‘lost’. This paper presents new empirical evidence regarding the weekend of the middle-class family, who are the section…
Opportunities to play the game: The effect of individual and school attributes on participation in sports
Historically, African Americans and white girls have not had the same access to playing sports as white boys have had. Changes in laws led to racial integration of sports teams and equal athletic opportunities for girls. Yet, racial and gender…
Opportunities and challenges facing NGOs using sport as a vehicle for development in post-apartheid South Africa
Post-apartheid South Africa manifests poor social indicators with over half the population living below the poverty line and the worst levels of inequality in the world, with much work needed to overcome the skewed legacy of apartheid. Sport suffered in…
Openly lesbian team sport athletes in an era of decreasing homohysteria
Sociologists who have examined the issue of lesbians in American sport in the 1980s and 1990s normally found overt and covert mechanisms of social discrimination. However, homophobia has been on a rapid decline over previous decades, and studies show attitudes…
Online news comments as a public sphere forum: Deliberations on Canadian children’s physical activity habits
While considerable scholarly research has examined online media’s function as a public sphere forum, surprisingly little analysis has extended to examining the public’s actual deliberations of the covered issue(s). Recognizing this gap, this discussion conceives online news comments in response…
Online Community or Electronic Tribe? Exploring The Social Characteristics and Spatial Production of an Internet Hockey Fan Culture
Scholarly interest in the relationship between sport and new media has increased significantly in recent years, yet research about online sport fan groups remains limited. This article contributes to this body of literature through an ethnographic examination of a fan-produced…
One Guy Named Mo: Race, Nation and the London 2012 Olympic Games
The triumphal track and field performances of British distance runner, Mo Farah, at the London 2012 Olympic Games were lauded both for their athletic endeavor and for their perceived validation of the rhetoric of ethnic and cultural diversity and inclusion…
On the terms of the recipient? Norwegian sports development aid to Tanzania in the 1980s
This article discusses the donor–recipient relationship in a sports development aid context, and identifies potential dilemmas occurring when aiming to give aidon the recipient’s terms. Using the case of the Norwegian sports development aid project Sport for All, it is…
On the Limits of the New and the Lasting Power of the Mediasport Interpellation
This essay comments on the limits of new and social media to change the contemporary landscape of mediated sport in meaningful ways. The first part of the essay speaks to the “limits of the new.” Here, the forces of “monetization”…
On the doorstep of equality: Attitudes toward gay athletes among academy-level footballers
In this semi-structured interview research, we investigate the attitudes of 22 academy-levelassociation football (soccer) players who are potentially on the verge of becoming professional athletes. We find that, as a result of these men belonging to a generation holding inclusive…
On the conceptualization, design, and evaluation of appealing, meaningful, and playable digital games for older people
While older people tend to be regarded as actual, or potential, players of digital games within literature on game studies, human-computer interaction, and gerontechnology, they are also often considered non avid users of digital technologies. This contradiction prompted us to…
On roads traveled and journeys ahead for IRSS
Now entering its 47th year of publication, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport is the oldest and most international of the scholarly journals devoted to the study of sport, culture, and society. While over the years we have…
On Balinese cockfights: Deeply extending play
In this article, I advance three points, each in service of “extending play” as a critical conceptual category. The article begins with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play,” tracing through its lens the possibilities for “deeply extending play.” The essay extends…
Olympism in Action, Olympic hosting and the politics of ‘Sport for Development and Peace’: investigating the development discourses of Rio 2016.
This paper offers an overview, and critical, comparative reading, of the discourses of international development championed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) versus those ascribed through media and corporate communications to the 2016 Summer Olympics, awarded in 2009 to the…
Olympics 2012 security: Welcome to lockdown London
As a metaphor for the London Olympics, it could hardly be more stark. 1 The much-derided ‘Wenlock’ Olympic mascot is now available in London Olympic stores dressed, no less, as a Metropolitan police officer. For £10.25 you, too, can own…
Olympic rings of peace? The Olympic movement peacemaking and intercultural understanding
This article examines the historical and contemporary links between Olympism and peacemaking. It traces the development of thought and praxis in relation to the Olympic movement’s aim and capacity to promote peaceful coexistence and intercultural understanding from the ancient Olympic…
Olympic boomtown: The social impacts of a one-time mega-event in Utah’s Heber Valley
We extend the research on the individual and community-level impacts of rapid growth development (boomtowns) to include communities that have been affected by a short-term, yet large-scale “mega-event”—the Olympics. Testing the assumption of generic similarities of social impacts between these…
Older men’s blueprint for “being a man.”
Does the cultural blueprint for “being a man” direct older men into patterns of conduct and emotions similar to younger men? In the absence of cultural guidelines for aging as a man, this theoretically grounded article discusses the masculinity standards…
Off-colour landscape: Framing race equality in sport coaching
The article examines how UK sport organizations have framed race equality and diversity, in sport coaching. Semi structured interviews were used to gain insight into organizational perspectives toward ‘race’, ethnicity, racial equality, and whiteness. Using Critical Race Theory and Black…
Of Menace and Mimicry: The 2008 Beijing Olympics
This article examines the Olympic narratives of young, educated urbanites in China to consider the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ role as a “diagnostic event” through which global conflicts and controversies coalesce and national identities are constructed. It illustrates how students and…
Of Colours and Scales
Professor Banton’s headlining contribution to this symposium is further evidence of his tireless devotion to pushing the bounds of our thinking, of his thinking, on questions related to racism. Like all his work on the topic, the current article displays…
Nothing to Report: A Semi-longitudinal Investigation of the Print Media Coverage of Sportswomen in British Sunday Newspapers
The under-representation of female athletes by print media has been widely acknowledged by feminist media scholars. However, there have been a number of recent studies which suggest that things are changing in terms of progress towards gender equality. In light…
Nothing but medals? Attitudes towards the importance of Olympic success
States intervene increasingly in financing and organization of Olympic elite sport in order to maximize national success in the medal table. In Germany and many other countries too that includes practices that have been criticized as unacceptable in democratic societies:…
Not so black and white: Race and promotion in Major League Baseball, 1951-1955
Jackie Robinson was the first acknowledged Blackplayer in 20th century Major League Baseball (MLB). By 1951, a few Black players had performed credibly at the Major League level, while others were integrating Minor League Baseball. Unlike other labor situations where…
Not So Black and White: A Multi-Divisional Exploratory Analysis of Male Student-Athletes’ Experiences at National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Institutions
The purpose of this study was to examine the nature and quality of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) male student-athletes’ college experiences across race, sport, and divisional classifications. In recent years, the NCAA and its member institutions have faced intense…
Not Out to Start a Revolution: Race, Gender, and Emotional Restraint among Black University Men
In this article, I use in-depth interviews with black university men to investigate race, gender, and emotions. Participation in dominant institutions requires African American men to exhibit extraordinary emotional restraint. Because anger is culturally associated with men, however, black men’s…
Not everybody is a golfer: Bourdieu and affluent bodies in Mexico
The present article analyzes processes of social reproduction among upper-middle- and upper-class individuals in contemporary Mexico City, using affluent golf clubs as a case study. Drawing on ethnographic data, it shows how private golf clubs are invisible sites for the…
Not an “extraordinary event”: NFL games and militarized civic ritual
In this article, which was delivered as the Alan G. Ingham Memorial Lecture to the 37th annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, I extend Ingham’s ideas regarding sport as civic ritual and combine it…
Norwegian elite-level coaches: Who are they?
Previous studies have shown that there is an underrepresentation of female coaches and a lack of opportunities for women to coach males, particularly at the elite-level. Very few studies, however, have focused on elite-level coaches’ demographics and whether these vary…
Normalizing Sexual VIolence: Young Women Account for Harassment and Abuse
Despite high rates of gendered violence among youth, very few young women report these incidents to authority figures. This study moves the discussion from the question of why young women do not report them toward how violence is produced, maintained,…
Non-performing inclusion: A critique of the English Football Association’s Action Plan on homophobia in football.
The English Football Association’s (FA’s) Action Plan entitled ‘Opening Doors and Joining In’, published in early 2012, aims to promote the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGB&T) people and tackle homophobic abuse in football. The document is the…
Non-mega sporting events’ social impacts: a sensemaking approach of local governments’ perceptions and strategies.
Research question: The literature investigating non-mega sport events’ social impacts remains limited. Furthermore, these impacts have mainly been examined from the point of view of spectators or residents. This article explores how these impacts are perceived by local governments. Based…
Nobody’s Innocent: The Role of Customers in the Doping Dilemma
Customers who boycott an organization after some scandal may actually exacerbate the fraud problem they would like to prevent. This conclusion is derived from a game-theoretic model that introduces a third player into the standard inspection game. Focusing on the…
Nice Korea, Naughty Korea: Media Framings of North Korea and the Inter-Korean Relationship in the London 2012 Olympic Games
This study examines mainstream news media framings of North Korea and the inter-Korean relationship in the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, focusing on the role that the media played in privileging particular understandings of nationalism, conflict and reconciliation. Print news…
New screen action and its memories: The “live” performance of mediated sport fandom
The experience of watching sport on television is changing with the proliferation of screens, the diversification of screen-based content, and the extension of interactive screen-facilitated communication. In recent decades, sports broadcast television viewing opportunities shifted from a primary reliance on…
New media, professional sport and political economy.
New media technologies are seen to be changing the production, delivery and consumption of professional sports and creating a new dynamic between sports fans, athletes, clubs, governing bodies and the mainstream media. However, as Bellamy and McChesney (2011) have pointed…
New Europe, new chances? The migration of professional footballers to Poland’s Ekstraklasa.
The intention of this paper is to offer a preliminary analysis of the migrations of professional footballers to Poland’s top division – the Ekstraklasa. Based upon a series of interviews conducted with migrant players located at an Ekstraklasa club, the…
New categories are not enough: Rethinking the measurement of sex and gender in social surveys
Recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. The focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond “male” and “female” to questions about the respondent’s gender.…
New approaches for studies of Muslim women and sport
This article offers a new approach for examining Muslim women in sport, which combines the domains of sporting participation, consumption and representation. It proposes moving beyond a sports development paradigm and deficit model of sports participation, whereby marginal communities are…
Neoliberal urban entrepreneurial agendas, Dunedin Stadium and the Rugby World Cup: Or ‘If you don’t have a stadium, you don’t have a future’.
This chapter presents a case study set in Beloit, a fishing village located on Ataro Island, 30 kilometres across the sea from Dli, capital of Timor-Leste. Tourism is an industry that could help promote the natural and cultural assets of…
Neoliberal freedoms, privatisation and the future of physical education.
Focussing on the ideological aspects of privatisation, this paper explores ways in which ‘freedom’ has been activated discursively to justify actions involving changes to both the structure and the content of formal education in the UK. Empirically, the paper will…
Neighborhood stigma and the sporting lives of young people in public housing
This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in ‘Redcrest’, a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic…
Negotiations of the ageing process: Older adults’ stories of sports participation.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the talk of older athletes, with particular focus on how the context of sport helps them negotiate the ageing process. It draws on personal stories provided by 44 World Masters Games competitors…
Negotiating the ‘F-word’ in the field: Doing feminist ethnography in action sport cultures
This paper examines the potential of social theory for enhancing researcher reflexivity and praxis in the ethnographic field. More specifically, we advocate the potential of feminist interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “regulated liberties” for helping critical ethnographers navigate some…
Negotiating Gender through Fun and Play: Radical Femininity and Fantasy in the Red Hat Society
The Red Hat Society (RHS) is a relatively new and international women’s network that offers “fun” and “friendship” specifically for women over fifty. Its members, the Red Hatters, are easily recognized in the streets by their red hats and otherwise…
Negotiating “new” narratives: Rio de Janeiro and the “media geography” of the 2014 FIFA World Cup
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is currently in the midst of an extraordinary period of mega-event hosting. While a large number of articles have been keen to illustrate the transformative potential and dilemmas of utilizing mega-events to advance an urban agenda,…
Nearly 100,000 Job Bias Charges in Fiscal Year 2012
Commission Obtains $365 Million for Victims of Workplace Discrimination; Reduces Charge Inventory by 10 Percent for Second Consecutive Year.
NCAA academic reform: History context and challenges
The purpose of this article is to offer a sociohistorical overview of academic reform in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). To do so, the author draws heavily from football history and its association with academic reform in the broader…
NCAA Academic Performance Program (APP): Future Directions
This paper represents the first major effort to conduct a comprehensive review of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Academic Performance Program (APP) and to recommend to the NCAA Board of Directors those modifications that will lead to further improvement…
Navigating barriers: A qualitative examination of the underrepresentation of Black females as head coaches in collegiate basketball.
Although sport management researchers have produced findings with regard to diversity in the leadership positions of college athletics, this examination has focused separately on gender (Inglis, Danylchuk, & Pastore, 1996; Inglis, Danylchuk, & Pastore, 2000; Knoppers, Meyer, Ewing, & Forrest,…
Nautical small-scale sports events portfolio: A strategic leveraging approach
Research question: This study analyzes the leverage process of a nautical small-scale sports events portfolio, hosted in a tourist community of Portugal. Strategic goals were identified and the implementation process examined, according to economic and social leveraging models. Since these…
Natural disaster arrhythmia and action sports: The case of the Christchurch earthquake
Taking inspiration from French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s theory of ‘rhythmanalysis’, the author advocates new ways of thinking about the impact of natural disaster on the bodies and everyday mobilities of those who continue to live in disrupted spaces.…
Nationalism in the United States and Canadian primetime broadcast coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics
The CBC’s and NBC’s primetime broadcasts of the 2014 Winter Olympics were analyzed to determine differences between the media treatment of home nation and foreign athletes. The CBC results showed that Canadian athletes represented 48.5% of total athlete mentions and…
National identity and important Australians
Aspects of the national narrative of an advanced industrialised nation are examined in this research. Nationally representative survey data suggest the most important collective figures for Australian identity are the Anzacs, colonial free settlers and post-Second World War immigrants, while…
Narrating goals: a case study on the contribution of Digital Storytelling to cross-cultural leadership development
This case study and evaluation of a Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop for young women identifies the strengths, limits and challenges of transformational feminist leadership development within sport for development programmes (SDP). Based on postcolonial feminist approaches and empirical evidence, the…
Multiple Voices: Improving Participation of Muslim girls in Physical Education and School Sports
This study reports on data from a larger-scale research project in one city in the West Midlands, England. The study was commissioned by the local education authority because of the rising incidence of parental withdrawal of Muslim girls from physical…
Moving bodies beyond the social/biological divide: toward theoretical and transdisciplinary adventures
In this paper I call for ‘new forms of thinking and new ways of theorizing’ the complex relations between the biological and social in sport and physical culture. I illustrate the inseparability of our biological and social bodies in sport…
More than murder: Ethics and hunting in New Zealand
In this article I examine the practice of hunting in New Zealand with particular reference to the ways in which hunters make sense of hunting, the embodied experience of hunting, and the moral status of animals. Drawing on ethnographic and…
More than just play: Unmasking black child labor in the athletic industrial complex
African Americans’ hypervisibility in sports remains a frequent point of critique. There has been a tendency to blame Black youths for their supposed “sports fixation.” Complicating this narrative of cultural pathology, I examine the foundational importance of Black Boys’ athletic…
More than just games: the global politics of the Olympic Movement
This paper is rooted in the premise that the Olympic Movement represents an important – yet often overlooked – global political site, and it begins by situating the Olympic Movement within the global policy by focusing on its role as…
More than a sport: Tennis education and health
Youth interest and participation in tennis is growing in the United States, and tennis is among the top nine most popular school sports that girls and boys participate in at the high school level (NFHS, 2012). Tennis also engages both…
MoneyRoundball? The drafting of international players by National Basketball Association teams
National Basketball Association (NBA) teams have drafted international players regularly since 1996. Did NBA teams value international prospects accurately relative to U.S. players? Regressions of NBA performance reveal that international players drafted through 2001 tended to outperform expectations adjusted for…
Monday Night Football and the Racial Roots of the Network TV Event
Launched in 1970, American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) Monday Night Football made live prime time sports television viable when most sports broadcasts were relegated to weekends. It did so in part by packaging games for a crossover viewership. To this end,…
Minding the terrazzo gap between athletes and nonathletes: Representativeness, integration, and academic performance at the U.S. Air Force Academy
The tension between focusing on collegiate athletic or academic performance has persisted for decades. A recent study finds that recruited athletes in college athletic programs underperform academically, earning lower grades than predicted. It postulates that increased representativeness and integration efforts…
Methods that move: A physical performative pedagogy of subjectivity.
Driven by a desire to interrogate and articulate the role and place of the body in the study of sport, this paper encourages those who are incited by a richer understanding of the physical to expand and elaborate upon the…
Messengers of hope: A boy with autism his church and the Special Olympics
Messengers of Hope is the story of Michael Leon, an adolescent on the autistic spectrum, his church, and the Special Olympics. It is a story of transformation. Michael’s parents and family, Michael, and Montrose Church are all transformed through their…