Search results

The intent of this chapter is to examine the historical and present-day intersections of injury, impairment, pain and risk-taking in the Paralympic Movement. While much has been written about injuries that end an athlete’s career, far less consideration has been given to how an injury might launch a sports career. In this chapter, I explore the experiences of athletes for whom injury and sports participation are fundamentally entwined.

To accomplish this, I draw on sociological literature on sport and injury, psychological literature on identities and sport retirement and feminist disability theories. The discussion is further enriched by interviews with Paralympic athletes and informed by own experience as a researcher, guide and volunteer in the Paralympic Movement.

This work illustrates how systems of representation intersect to (re)produce identities. This includes demonstrating how some individuals use sport as a means of claiming an athletic identity while distancing themselves from devalued disabled identities and the subsequent impact this can have on their psycho-social well-being.

This chapter demonstrates how sociologists of sports can engage with critical disability scholarship to deepen understandings of how and why individuals with impairments enter into sport and their experiences therein.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

To explore what suffering is, how suffering is embedded within the sociology of sport literature, and what suffering can do to athletes in sport. In addition, to discuss the value of an interdisciplinary approach and co-presence when researching athletes in suffering.

In the first part of the chapter, the concepts of pain, violence, and suffering are separated, and a justification for the study of suffering in sport is given. The second part of the chapter details sport and social problems, and the suffering body in sport is discussed, pulling from interdisciplinary theories and methodologies of suffering external to the sociology of sport.

Social inequalities and hidden forms of suffering may be reproduced in sport. Sport is questioned as a force of social mobility for vulnerable people. The context of sport can offer ‘healing’ properties for people in suffering. The impact of using an interdisciplinary approach and considering co-presence and relational suffering when researching suffering is discussed.

The difficulties understanding the complex, multi-dimensional nature of suffering are shared. New ways of engaging within the research act and specific theoretical approaches are suggested for improving the understanding of suffering within sport.