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This article explores coaching in boxe popolare (people's boxing) – a style of boxing codified by leftist grassroots groups in contemporary Italy. The paper presents a micro-sociological analysis of data collected during a three-year multi-sited participant observation focusing on Patrick (pseudonym), who is the leading coach of a boxe popolare team. It examines the micropolitics of reproduction via the under-researched notion of 'sociability'. To contextualise this, a Bourdieusian framework, drawing on the concepts of 'field', 'capital', 'habitus', 'doxa' and 'symbolic violence', is employed. Findings highlight how boxe popolare is infused with far-left militant culture. Patrick uses sociability strategically, (a) to reproduce an embodied ethics of this specific boxing style; (b) to strengthen the collective values inherent within boxe popolare political milieu; (c) to perform the boxe popolare network; and finally, (d) to legitimise his own authority in the coaching structure. In conclusion, we highlight the importance of sociability for understanding micropolitical influence in coaching practice and consider the emergent idea of hybrid field as a way to better explore the interplay between coaching pedagogy, the political field and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the subtraction of Section 28 from the 1988 Local Government Act in 2003, a substantial amount of research was published that specifically examined the experiences of lesbian physical education (PE) teachers. This article contributes to the existing academic literature by exploring the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual teachers working in a post-Section 28 school environment. Drawing on life history interviews of two lesbian PE teachers, we offer insights into how the abolition of Section 28 has affected their lives. Comparable to previous studies, both women reported feeling fearful of the consequences of identifying as lesbian and employed various strategies in order to maintain a divide between their public and private lives so as to conceal their sexual identities from colleagues, pupils and parents. However, in contrast to much of the previous literature, we found that the teachers in this study also identified with narratives of resistance. Despite being fearful of coming out at work, they nevertheless remained committed to coming out when the context is appropriate, to challenging the heteronormative symbolic order configured around the heterosexual/homosexual binary and to more proactively promoting sexual diversity and tolerance in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers insights into the increasing dichotomy that exists between official forms of opportunity and access and the actual ‘lived experience’ of young peoples' trajectories towards careers in the UK's market-orientated Sport-Fitness and Physical Education employment sectors. It does so by drawing on data generated by an 18-month ethnographic study to provide a case study of two students who chose to make the transition from a Foundation Degree in Sport Coaching (FdSc) onto a ‘Top Up’ Bachelor of Science (BSc) Sports Science and Coaching qualification. The paper illustrates their experiences of this transition in relation to the following phases of their trajectory (1)facilitators of transition(2)managing expectations(3)transformationand (4)isolation. The findings highlight how, for some individuals, current transitions facilitate a critical distance between individual dispositions towards education and the positions and practices of higher education. We suggest that education and employers must further listen to the voices and experiences of students that transcend the rhetorics of official policy discourse to facilitate a process in which the conditions of transition may begin to be reimagined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]