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This chapter examines the (in)visibility and symbolism of women in sports governance on the island of Ireland, taking as its main empirical focus available data on the boards of government-funded national governing bodies, north and south. The distinctiveness of the Irish case is explained by three factors: the governance minefield, itself a legacy of Irish-British relations and partition in the 1920s, recognisable patterns in gender relations north and south and the functioning of sport as a safe, largely unquestioned and intriguingly vague symbolism for inclusion and peace in Northern Ireland. These conditions have resonance today, not only for women in sport and the approach to quotas, for instance, but that also play out in the delivery of Brexit and the struggles that characterise Irish-British relations more generally. The chapter concludes with a consideration of future challenges and areas for further research.

To examine the ways in which sports-related brain injury (concussion and subconcussion) is both similar to and different from other injuries and to set out a sociological understanding of the injury, its manifestation and management.

There is a broad contextualization of the ‘issue’ of concussion and the processes that have brought this to the fore, an examination of the ways in which concussion has been figuratively clouded from plain view, and an outline of the main contributions of the social sciences to understanding this injury – the culture of risk and the mediating effect of social relationships. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the emergence of concerns over chronic traumatic encephalopathy has stimulated a fundamental change in attitudes towards sport injuries, and if this has had a significant impact on the social visibility of concussion.

The two available sociological studies of the lived experiences of concussion are situated within a broader analysis of the politicization of sports medicine and the emergence of a particular social discourse around sports-related brain injury.

The difficulties emanating from the dominance of a biomedical approach to concussion are discussed along with the need for further research, incorporating a more holistic view of concussion, as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.

This chapter examines the interconnected social, political and economic forces that are shaping and reshaping contemporary football. It identifies drivers but, critically, attributes commercialisation to structural (and not solely) economic differentiation, including the greater interdependence of the sexes in the game. First is a brief overview of the growing significance of women's football within the global sport system. Two zones of prestige exist currently for the professional game, in the United States and England. Questions are raised concerning the uneven effects of commercialisation and the contested values that underpin changes in the women's game. The chapter concludes with some reflections on future developments and research avenues that might be explored.

This chapter introduces women's football in a global, professional era. Key in this is an acknowledgement of the male-dominated roots of the sport in many contexts, which has historically served to restrict women's participation. However, we identify the significant growth of women's involvement in football, which has resulted in professional opportunities for women playing and working in the sport. Football organisations are increasingly taking the development of the women's game more seriously and football can be considered a legitimate career opportunity for women. The chapter then identifies the scope of the book, which includes contributions on the lived experience of professionalisation, the processes of professionalisation and the role of commercialisation and media.

To outline the multiple ways in which animals are inserted into sporting practices, outline historical and contemporary approaches to studying human–animal sporting practices, and advocate for the centering of sociological problems in human–animal research in sporting contexts and cultures and for considering such problems in relation to environmental issues.

In the first part of the chapter, conceptual differentiation of animals in the animal–sport complex is presented. Subsequently, studies of interspecies sport are reviewed with reference to the “animal turn” in the literature. In the second part, a critique is presented relating to: (1) the privileging of companion animals, especially dogs and horses, which overlooks the multiple ways animals are integrated into (multispecies) sport; (2) micro-sociological and insider ethnographies of companionship displacing of sociological problems in favor of relationship perspectives; and (3) the environment as absent from analysis. The conclusion offers implications for understanding multispecies sport and the environment.

I chart a general shift in emphasis and focus from animals as an “absent presence” in pursuit of sociological knowledge toward a clearly defined focus on interspecies sport as a field of research characterized by investigations of relationships with companion animals through the “animal turn.”

The focus on companion species means other animals (i.e., noncompanions) are understudied, big picture sociological questions are often sidelined, environmental concerns marginalized, and sociological understanding of the environment more generally is either ignored or reduced to a conduit of human–animal interactions.