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Sport co-produces our notions of sex, gender and sexuality. Sport policies based on inclusion demand trans athletes become visible. This creates a problem within sport's hierarchical gender order, and trans athletes' bodies become comprehensible only through mobility from one sex/gender to the other – literally the embodiment of movement through a static gendered space.

In this chapter, we examine the contradictory expectations placed on trans athletes to be visible within heterosexist, white supremacist ‘regimes of looking’ (Fleetwood, 2011). Our purpose is twofold: (1) to critically examine the construction of transness through white racial frames and (2) to grapple with the inherent harmfulness of sport. We ask why trans people would want to participate in an institution that actively limits opportunities for expansive subjectivity, ultimately concluding that the potential for queer futures lies in the very construction of limits themselves. We forward a belief in what sport could be when intentionally created through queer world building. We highlight teams, leagues and spaces that have developed processes that work against dominant forms of medicolegal recognition and visibility politics.

Purpose – To outline new research on the ways in which older athletes incorporate drinking practices into their social and sporting identities. Drawing on research with older Australian athletes, the chapter asks us to re-imagine the sport–alcohol nexus to include new sites and subjects that can shed light on wider articulations of the pleasurable and problematic relationships between sport, alcohol and social identity.

Design/methodology/approach – In the first part of the chapter, key themes in sport and ageing research are discussed. In the second, issues of alcohol, older age and sporting identities are considered, drawing on research at the 2017 Australian Masters Games. This sets the scene for a fuller discussion and analysis of some of the missed opportunities in alcohol and sport research, and their implications for sport and social policy, health promotion and social care more broadly.

Findings – The chapter reveals several under-developed opportunities in a broader research agenda on sport and alcohol, including the role alcohol plays in conferring membership and belonging to the sporting communities of older athletes. The chapter suggests that a recalibration of popular understandings of sport, ageing and alcohol – both as separate and as inter-related concerns – may provide an opportunity for addressing wider social concerns with ageing more broadly.

Research limitations/implications – Discussion of ageing and alcohol, through the lens of sport, has important implications for an analysis of drinking practices and in sport, and for sport and social policy, health promotion and social care.

This chapter examines the proposition that drone technologies are a force for good and discusses a number of applications that have become prominent within this category. It investigates how drones are being used within a growing number of sectors, including leisure, research, health, journalism, and sports, and analysing the development of such pursuits and their implications. It focusses on what resides behind the desire to re-characterise drones as objects of desire – and products more generally – and as vehicles for positive social change. Central to this chapter is the claim that drones are vehicles for asserting agency and competence over technology, but that there is also a trend towards the erosion of skills required to operate such devices, which undermines their overall evaluation has sources of empowerment.

This chapter utilizes a feminist lens to review the academic literature within the new and growing “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) movement. It explores the ways in which issues pertaining to gender and social change are taken up by SDP programmes and initiatives to argue that the movement seemingly understands gender in one of two ways. The literature reveals that SDP programming seeks to either allow for girls' sporting access in mixed-gender settings or aspires to “empower” females in girls-only contexts. I suggest that the SDP movement's understanding of gender reflects the current historical moment with respect to contrasting third-wave and post-feminist sensibilities. In both instances, girls are positioned to have gendered identities/experiences that need to be assisted, altered, or enhanced, and thus the SDP movement obscures an understanding of gender as a relational identity. I contend that increased research and attention to the possibilities of re-imagining gender relationships within the sporting context will enhance the SDP movement.

Places have deep-seated meaning and serve to shape our social grouping and practices. Sporting stadia are a highly influential aspect of many people’s lives that drive the inexorable journey towards team affiliation, immersive experiences, intense loyalty and the creation of an enduring, local identity. This paper aims to explore how the nature of a sporting place has been shaped to change the practice of football as a sport, as a business and as entertainment. This paper uncovers how Forest Green Rovers (FGR) differentiates itself from the historical and socio-economic roots of football and uses numerous novel sustainability initiatives to re-imagine a new type of football place, club and fandom.

Over a two-year period, the authors used multiple data collection methods, engaging in participant observation, interviews and focus groups, at FGR and related events. A thematic data analysis was conducted to pinpoint and extract key areas surrounding the unique structures, practices and reinforced behaviours that have developed in FGR.

The findings show that FGR’s place operates as a central location through which stakeholders, ideas, resources and practices have been disrupted and re-imagined around the principles of sustainability. This fundamental shift in FGR’s place, changing its composition, character and reach, means that FGR can be conceptualised as a novel place synonymous with new global social movements.

This study presents unique insights into the world’s first socially and environmentally conscious football club. This study examines the construction and operation of the place that facilitates its actions which go beyond what has been seen and maybe expected from commercial sporting institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect upon the place of rugby union in contemporary Wales where the game is used as an important tool to promote images of the nation. Using Benedict Anderson's conceptualisation of the nation as an “imagined community” the paper aims to locate and analyse the game within and around discourses of Cool Cymru, a term coined in the late twentieth century to promote images of a new vibrant Wales as popularised through its leading music bands.

A critical sociological approach analyses and problematises notions of Welshness as it relates to the national sport of rugby.

The nation is often (re)presented and conceptualised as a monolithic whole where rugby's assumed centrality is rarely questioned. This essay focuses upon the areas of language, geography and gender to demonstrate the situated limits of these (re)presentations. Rugby union and Cool Cymru are also located alongside devolution and are examined further with specific reference to the postmodern sporting celebrity.

This work highlights an increasing primacy afforded to the capital city of Cardiff within a re‐imagining of the nation and the national game.

In recent decades, significant advances have been made at both the grassroots and professional levels of women's ice hockey in North America. Yet, despite recent achievements, such as the establishment of ‘professional’ leagues, and compelling narratives of progress, athletes and league organisers still face significant challenges. The barriers women face, such as reduced access to resources and opportunity, lack of legitimacy, and league instability, and a continued reliance on relationships with men's sporting leagues, such as the National Hockey League, suggest that women's ice hockey is accommodated into the game in ways that reinforce and perpetuate systems of gender, reproducing a neoliberal notion of failure. Using Halberstam's (2011) notion of failure as the place from which reform and transformation can take place, we offer a critical reading of the (re)formation of the National Women's Hockey League and the developments in women's (semi)professional ice hockey in North America.

Women's rugby in South Africa is a recent development. Inaugurated four years after the professionalisation of the men's game in 1997, the ‘Springbok Women’ national team faced an uphill battle in their struggle to match the century-old reputation and international respect enjoyed by the male ‘Springboks’. The women's game grew slowly over the last two decades, starting from a low base with only a few clubs in 2000. Despite its designation as a national team with the title of ‘Springbok’ in 2012, the women's game on the national and club level remains an under-resourced largely amateur game with only a small group of semi-professionals. Given the country's lack of a dedicated professional league or national competition, the national team struggled in the international arena. Poor results, in the end, resulted in the prioritisation of rugby sevens, despite this shortened version retarding the growth of the traditional game. After two decades, the semi-professional ‘Women Springboks’, known as ‘Imbokodo’ or ‘grinding stone’ since 2019, is still facing salary discrimination, inadequate resourcing and a lack of genuine recognition as its exclusion from Team South Africa for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games demonstrated. At the start of the second decade of the millennium, the situation looks decidedly bleak for women's rugby in the country despite the South African Rugby Union's endorsement of World Rugby's international programme for game development.

While transgender people have had some success in gaining recognition and human rights in the collection of nations known colloquially as ‘the West’, a well-financed reactionary movement is attempting to roll back these gains. A constellation of white supremacist, conservative, and heteropatriarchal organizations and movements are in collusion with so-called ‘gender critical feminists’ to resist feminist and gender-inclusive challenges to traditional gender and sexual hierarchies by targeting trans girls and women – more so than trans boys, trans men and non-binary people – for surveillance and exclusion (Sharrow, 2021a, 2021b). In the past several years, bills designed to delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways have been introduced in many US state legislatures. Within this larger anti-trans campaign, bills designed specifically to block trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport have been signed into law in 11 US states to date and proposed in many others. It is no accident that organized sport is a site for contesting the inclusion of transgender people and that transgender girls and women are the primary targets of these campaigns. Debates about criteria for female eligibility and a succession of pseudo-scientific forms of ‘sex testing’ in elite levels of sport highlight both the ideological nature of the two-sex system and the intense material and cultural investment in maintaining its façade. In this chapter, I mobilize moral panic theory to focus specifically on anti-trans campaigns in the United States aimed at preventing trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport as evidence of a testosterone panic.