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The purpose of this chapter is to invite readers into a discussion of experiences with and perspectives on creating safer spaces in education. Dialog has been used to demonstrate analytical processes and meaning-making, as well as aspects of “space” in education research. This dialog represents a safe space to share and access insights, experiences, and reactions to the ways in which we can foster safer spaces in education for our students and ourselves.

This research draws on social identity literature and intersectionality to examine the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality within hip-hop music and how this shapes the identity development of college students. Data were collected from 26 college students through semi-structured interviews. Participants described men as being portrayed as hyper-masculine and identified lyrics that supported toxic masculinity. Participants reported that the dominant theme in hip-hop today centered on “trappin” or selling drugs and glamorized that life. African American men, in particular, described how this theme in music shaped the narrative around race and masculinity, how others saw them as Black men, and how they had to counter that image and stereotype as college students. Participants described the negative portrayal of women in hip-hop. However, women participants were more conflicted in their perception of women in hip-hop and said that when women were the artists this illustrated more agency and was liberating even if the images and lyrics were sexualized. Participants were adamant that constructions of gender and sexuality within hip-hop music and videos shaped expectations within relationships. Despite the criticisms of hip-hop, participants described how raising consciousness through hip-hop affected their own identities. This research contextualizes the findings with a discussion of how popular culture shapes identity around race, gender, and sexuality and shapes the expectations within relationships. Further, the research concludes with a discussion of intersectionality and how this provides a better understanding of the effects of identity development among marginalized groups.

Traditional visions of masculinity are inextricably linked to some tropes believed as ‘essential’ in men such as valour or strength. If a man fails in comply with these ‘essences’, then he fits into a form of deviant masculinity that transforms him into an Other.

Now, what happens with the issues of ageing in masculinity? The ageing man slowly but naturally loses all the aspects that made him ‘manly’ enough, becoming instead a double of himself. Men are doomed to fail as their bodies start to malfunction.

Two horror films highlight ageing and failed masculinity as a way to engage with these new concerns. Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2012) and Late Phases (Adrián García Bogliano, 2014) revolves around two aged heroes (Elvis Presley in the former, an ageing war veteran in the latter) who live within retirement communities. There, in the last years of their life, both men must face supernatural menaces: a walking mummy and a werewolf respectively. Facing supernatural horror, the ageing heroes must compensate their failing masculinity – a body that does not work as well as it used to do – with new forms of empathy and manliness.

Uniting film studies with investigations on masculinity and ageing, we propose to read these two films to point the ways in which both stories engage with the cultural politics of ageing masculinity.

African American student-athletes represent the largest racial minority group of athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the majority of male student-athletes in football and basketball. The NCAA has partnered with It’s On Us, an awareness campaign to help end sexual violence on college campuses. Intercollegiate athletics is a viable context, then, to consider transformative Black masculinity and sexual violence prevention. Transformative Black masculinity is when an African American or Black man intentionally employs his identity in the service of social justice and purposefully engages other Black males, as well as others, for that cause. This chapter considers transformative Black masculinity as a conceptual tool for the intentional engagement of Black male student-athletes within institutions of higher education for sexual violence prevention. Recommendations for policy, education and practice, and research are provided.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and problematize the taken-for-granted conceptual understanding of risk practices in sport cultures. By inspecting the mainstay, and one might argue relatively stagnant, constructions of risk in the sociological study of sport, a case for attending to a wider range of risk-based ideologies and cultural practices is presented. The chapter ventures away from viewing risk as predominantly physical in sport settings and constructing athletes as oppressed agents who naively acquiesce to practices of self-injury and self-alienation in sport cultures. Emphasis is given to a broad spectrum of risks undertaken in the practice of sport, and the reflexive, personal nature by which risk may be understood by sports and physical culture participants.

In the first part of the chapter, the relatively simplistic or unidimensional construction of risk in sociological research in sport is reviewed. In the second part, the complexity of the concept of risk is then discussed alongside case examples that push the analytical boundaries of how risk is a multidimensional construct of athletes’ minds, bodies, selves, beliefs, values, and identities in a host of relational contexts.

Risk is best understood as a set of practices and belief that exists on a continuum in sport and physical cultures. Risk-taking in sport, however, can be personally injurious and detrimental along a number of lines but is also often calculated, personally/group satisfying and existentially rewarding at times. If the concept of risk is to be applied and interrogated in sport and physical cultures, it should be done so, therefore, in radically contextual manners.

This chapter illustrates the need for new and exploratory theoretical understandings of what risk means to athletes and other participants in sport and physical culture. New substantive topics are proposed, as are methodological suggestions for representations of the unfolding risk in the process of “doing” sport.