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As part of a larger study into the influence of a Writers in the Schools (WITS) professional development consultancy, this narrative inquiry began just as Hurricane Harvey, the second most costly hurricane to hit the United States, devastated the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017 and drew to a close in late 2020 during the COVID-19 global pandemic. This chapter explores the 2017–2018 school-year interactions between WITS Collaborative writer, Mary Austin (pseudonym), and six writing teachers with whom she worked at McKay High School (pseudonym) in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. With record flooding and widespread damage causing school-opening delays, teachers, students, and WITS consultants navigated a rip tide of emotions as they strived to balance educational/professional needs and duties with personal loss and unexpected financial burdens. This inquiry examines how WITS teacher professional development was carried out in the midst of these trying circumstances.

When FECS spins out of human intervention and regulatory control, then it can easily harm and constrain the markets as it happened on Black Friday of October 1929, resulting in the Great Depression, and the September–October 2008 Financial Crisis, when some 17 mega global investment banks ran out of control and lost close to trillion US dollars in market capitalization. This chapter defines, analyzes, classifies, and morally assesses occupational and corporate fraud, corruption and money-laundering, and their other evil forms. When we allow our choices to be driven by passion, choosing thereby to ignore or fail to investigate outcomes, the results are too often flawed and unintended, as the cases of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie May that collapsed around September–October 2008 would attest. While we should condemn abuses within the FECS, one can also seek to understand the origins and originating systems of fraud, corruption, and various forms of deceptions and chicanery, and search for remedial strategies for eradicating these ills of FECS. Several contemporary market cases of fraud, corruption, and bribery will be identified to illustrate the contents of this chapter.

This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were significantly related to business interests, consumer interests, agricultural activity, and the presence of existing national banks. The work also shows that the first counties to receive the new state banks were associated with higher agricultural activity, larger population size, and the presence of existing national banks. By examining the vote and the location of early entrants in state banking, this chapter contributes to the literature exploring the historical development of state-chartered banking and the dual-banking system in the US.

The chapter explores the developments in work on the history of quantification and sport, explaining how quantification in sport is generally understood, and then establishing what a sociological approach offers to scholars interested in exploring new expressions of these developments in biometrics and Big Data. It then outlines some potential directions scholars might pursue to further develop knowledge of these developments in the context of sport.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature from the sociology of quantification, sport sociology and quantification, and Big Data to provide historical, contemporary, and future oriented assessments of sport and datafication.

By situating a discussion of Big Data and biometrics in the context of sport, this chapter argues for the value of a sociological approach to these areas. The chapter engages prior work as a way to move scholars to challenge the assumed epistemological and political power of numbers for the way we engage sport.

The chapter argues for a number of future areas of study that may push the boundaries of existing research in the area.

The chapter provides a survey of the literature on sport, analytics, and Big Data as an impetus for future research into the importance of a sociological approach to these areas in the context of sport.