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Critical scholarship in sport for development (SfD) advocates transformative research to disrupt the historical colonising view of sport as a vehicle to acculturate people into the values and norms of dominant Western culture. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth throughout the research process and consequently has the potential to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production in SfD. In reality, however, authentic engagement of co-researchers in the research process is often largely confined to data collection. This article draws on the decolonising lens as a theoretical framework to examine tensions, possibilities, and power relations that researchers and co-researchers encounter when co-designing and implementing YPAR in SfD. The project comprised a sixteen-week YPAR in a community-based football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection comprised weekly collaborative meetings, observations collected as field notes, artefacts produced by participants, interviews, and reflective meetings. Findings centred on three themes: (a) finding sensitive ways to navigate the tensions of building trust and rapport; (b) negotiating the struggle between the co-researchers and the coaches about the use of space within the sport context; and (c) the challenges of relinquishing power in research and knowledge production, as reflected in our collective struggle to communicate to participants the value of YPAR for themselves and their communities. The findings challenge a romantic view that YPAR is guaranteed to be an empowering experience for young people; instead, they foreground the complexities and messiness of the process of sharing power with co-researchers in SfD. We conclude by advocating for critical, reflexive YPAR with explicit social transformation objectives to work toward the co-production of knowledge with young people.

Background: Over the past five decades, the number of people from refugee backgrounds in developed countries has been on the constant rise. Although the field of refugee and forced migration studies in relation to education and sport has grown considerably in recent years, very little is known about refugee-background students' perceptions of Physical Education (PE).Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate refugee-background students' perceptions of PE in Swedish high schools, using a salutogenic approach. Participants and settings: This qualitative study was conducted in two Swedish high schools and involved eleven students from refugee backgrounds aged 16-18 years (seven boys and four girls) who originated from a variety of countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia and Albania. Data collection/analysis: A total of 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted, and the interviews were systematically coded and analyzed using the sense of coherence (SOC) components as analytical tools. Findings: Three themes were identified that captured the students' perceptions and experiences: (1) PE was perceived as more meaningful in Sweden than in their country of origin due to short-term benefits (e.g. social interaction with friends, and improving personal health and wellbeing) and long-term benefits (e.g. learning for the future); (2) understanding the rules and purpose of the activities helped students to better comprehend the experiences acquired in PE and communicate with others; and (3) constructive social relationships with teachers and classmates were an essential resource in order to make PE manageable. Implications: We suggest that strengths-based approaches should be recognized and incorporated into PE in order to facilitate health promoting factors and wellbeing among students from refugee backgrounds.

There is a body of research that indicates the need for community-driven and culturally responsive pedagogies in sport-based interventions. There is much to learn from the pedagogical approaches and experiences of African Australian refugee-background coaches who work with refugee-background young people toward acceptance and affirmation of their cultural and racial identities. This paper explores African Australian refugee-background coaches' pedagogies in working with African Australian refugee-background young people in a grassroots football programme in Melbourne. Participants included an African Australian refugee-background young woman and four coaches. Data collection spanned a six-month period and included observations and semi-structured interviews. The findings were analysed using Ladson-Billings' [Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. "American Educational Research Journal," 32(3), 465-491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465; Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). "The dreamkeepers?: Successful teachers of African American children." Jossey-Bass Publishers; Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. The Remix. "Harvard Educational Review," 84(1), 74-84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751] conceptualisation of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. The study identified three main themes. First, the coaches considered themselves 'barrier breakers': they were able to connect the African Australian refugee-background young people to different resources in and outside of sports contexts to develop their success in football and in life. Second, the coaches considered the sport programme 'a family' where they were willing to nurture and support cultural competence by sharing power with the participants and their community. Third, the coaches created spaces for young people to develop awareness that allowed them to critique some of the social inequities experienced. Future studies should continue to move beyond a focus on predominantly white and middle-class providers and coaches in sport-based interventions. By including and foregrounding the voices of coaches who have diverse experiences, more diverse cultural knowledges are validated, enabling the translation of this knowledge into more culturally responsive sport programmes.

A great deal of research focusing on organizational diversity has explored dynamics that exclude women and minorities from positions of leadership in sport organizations. The relatively little change in diversity in these positions suggests a need to employ ways of engaging in diversity research that do not center on identity categories and primarily focus on practices. Drawing on notions of subtexts and on queer theory, this critical narrative review aims to make visible and to question organizational practices and processes that may contribute to the diversity "problem" within sport organizations. A subtextual analysis of 32 articles published in leading sport management journals reveals how dynamics of organizational culture, such as an uncritical use of the concept of diversity, the invisibility of practices sustaining gender binaries and heteronormativity, and the intersection of heteronormativity and White normativity, contribute to sustaining the status quo in sport organizations. The authors build on these findings to challenge scholars to further explore and address these practices and processes in sport organizations and in their own research by employing queered intersectional approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The value of sport as a vehicle for social development and progressive social change has been much debated, yet what tends to get missed in this debate is the way education may foster, enable or impede the transformative action that underpins the social outcomes to which the "sport for development and peace" (SDP) sector aspires. This article draws on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and his contemporaries to examine the nature of transformative action and how it may be fostered within SDP programs. Insights from critical pedagogy are applied to, and illustrated through, qualitative research undertaken with SDP programs located in Cameroon and Kenya. The findings show the complexities of designing and implementing critical pedagogy in a SDP context and, in particular, the challenges of creating and mobilizing for transformative action. Opportunities and lessons for embedding critical pedagogy within SDP programs are also presented.

This article examines the prevalence and characteristics of mixed methods research in the relatively new subdiscipline of sport management. A mixed methods study is undertaken to evaluate the epistemological/philosophical, methodological, and technical levels of mixed methods design in sport management research. The results indicate that mixed methods research is still rarely used, poorly legitimized and often weakly designed in this field. Our conclusions lead to the hypotheses that the more central a research field is, the higher the prevalence of mixed methods, and that mixed methods only slowly trickle down from central to more peripheral subdisciplines. Implications of the research findings for both mixed methods scholars and sport management researchers are discussed, and directions for future research are proposed.

Sport participation can offer migrants a modality to connect with dominant cultural norms and potentially foster interculturalism, yet it is often fraught with exclusion. Little is known about how informal sports that migrants have introduced into countries of resettlement affect their (non)belonging. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork over a 14-month period, this article examines how Hazara men's involvement in the ethno-specific informal sport of sangarag influences their post-migration experiences of (non)belonging in Australia. The findings indicate that Hazara men's construction of sangarag as a space and resource for belonging needs to be understood as a response to the challenging circumstances they experience in their settlement journeys. The overt and subtle politics of belonging that govern sangarag reinforce intra-group differentiations, most notably in relation to gender and ability. Further tensions stem from sangarag's marginal status outside of the Australian sports system, leaving participants to feel unsupported and misrecognised by local institutions. Implications for policy include the need to recognise and support the value that informal sports can have for migrants' ability to (re)claim a sense of belonging and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines online expressions of rivalry and hate speech in relation to antisemitic discourses in Dutch professional men's football (soccer), with specific attention devoted to how this has developed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyses football-related antisemitic discourses in the Dutch-speaking Twittersphere between 2018 and 2021. Assuming that during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic fan activity has moved increasingly toward the online domain, we specifically examine whether and how the past pandemic years have influenced football-related antisemitic discourses on Twitter. Tweets were scraped using the Twitter application programming interface and 4CAT (a capture and analysis Toolkit), producing a dataset of 7,917 unique posts. The authors performed thematic analysis of the Tweets and a selection of the Tweets was analyzed in depth using narrative digital discourse analysis. The findings show how these Tweets, while seemingly targeted exclusively at football opponents, contribute to wider exclusionary discourse in football and society that may have become more aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first few months of the pandemic, professional sport around the globe stopped, as competitions and leagues were cancelled, postponed, or went into hiatus while sport administrators scrambled to work out ways to reboot their product in a COVID-19 world. Sport media outlets were faced with the task of reporting on sport and filling the void for fans in the absence of any live content. This article is concerned with the content, both in quantity and quality that fans of women's sport could consume in those first months. In the context of the current "boom" in women's professional sports, we draw on the analysis of two online sport media sites to consider the narratives of female athletes that fans had access to. The findings suggest that during the beginning of the pandemic sport stories about women were largely erased and replaced by those appealing to a very different fan market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical scholarship in sport for development (SfD) advocates transformative research to disrupt the historical colonising view of sport as a vehicle to acculturate people into the values and norms of dominant Western culture. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth throughout the research process and consequently has the potential to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production in SfD. In reality, however, authentic engagement of co-researchers in the research process is often largely confined to data collection. This article draws on the decolonising lens as a theoretical framework to examine tensions, possibilities, and power relations that researchers and co-researchers encounter when co-designing and implementing YPAR in SfD. The project comprised a sixteen-week YPAR in a community-based football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection comprised weekly collaborative meetings, observations collected as field notes, artefacts produced by participants, interviews, and reflective meetings. Findings centred on three themes: (a) finding sensitive ways to navigate the tensions of building trust and rapport; (b) negotiating the struggle between the co-researchers and the coaches about the use of space within the sport context; and (c) the challenges of relinquishing power in research and knowledge production, as reflected in our collective struggle to communicate to participants the value of YPAR for themselves and their communities. The findings challenge a romantic view that YPAR is guaranteed to be an empowering experience for young people; instead, they foreground the complexities and messiness of the process of sharing power with co-researchers in SfD. We conclude by advocating for critical, reflexive YPAR with explicit social transformation objectives to work toward the co-production of knowledge with young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The previous two decades have witnessed an increasing number of policymakers and practitioners using sport programmes to achieve broader social development aims, particularly in countries in the Global South. A core element of these programmes has been the use of sport as a context to provide young people with social, personal and health education. However, despite the educative focus of the "sport for development and peace" (SDP) movement, there has been limited analysis within the existing literature of the pedagogies used and whether these are appropriate for achieving the aims of SDP programmes. This article seeks to review and critique the core pedagogical strategies used in SDP initiatives. Theoretical framework: This article draws on Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework to examine education through sport in the Global South. The authors consider Freire's work to provide a number of aspects that are relevant to SDP education. Freire has long been established as the standard-bearer of critical pedagogy globally including contexts relevant to where SDP education takes place. His work offers a conceptual framework that challenges the status quo and offers marginalized groups the opportunity to enhance their agency, outcomes that are at the heart of the SDP movement. This article outlines key themes associated with Freirean pedagogy including the politicization of education, the possibility of transformation through education and the importance of dialogical education for creating "critically transitive consciousness". Discussion: We use these core foundational concepts to critique existing pedagogical strategies in SDP and outline how they currently do not go far enough in providing a truly transformative educational experience for participants. The discussion considers the use of traditional didactic, peer education and relationship-building pedagogies in SDP and analyses the limitations of each of these using the critical lens of Freire's pedagogy. Conclusion: We conclude by outlining how Freirean pedagogy could be better utilized within SDP education and outline some of the practical implications of doing so. The need for flexibility in SDP curriculum development is highlighted and the importance of ensuring that this is grounded within a local context, dealing with specific local issues, is also noted. This is at odds with the current movement within SDP to standardize the education that takes place within this context. We also consider the implications for recruiting and training educators to deliver a more critical pedagogy, outlining some of the qualities such individuals should be seeking to develop in order to engage in a more transformative education process through sport.

Funding bodies seek to promote scientific research that has a social or economic impact beyond academia, including in sport management. Knowledge translation in sport management remains largely implicit and is yet to be fully understood. This study examines how knowledge translation in sport management can be conceptualized and fostered. The authors draw on a comparative analysis of coproduced research projects in Belgium and Australia to identify the strategic, cognitive, and logistic translation practices that researchers adopt, as well as enablers and constraints that affect knowledge translation. The findings show ways in which knowledge translation may be facilitated and supported, such as codesign, boundary spanning, adaptation of research products, and linkage and exchange activities. The findings reveal individual, organizational, and external constraints that need to be recognized and, where possible, managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elite and semielite athletes commonly experience mental health concerns and disorders. Compared with men athletes, women athletes are at greater risk of a range of psychological stressors that contribute to health concerns and mental health disorders, which can impact their career satisfaction and longevity. In order to address and improve the mental health of women athletes, it is necessary to simultaneously tackle the gender specific psychosocial stressors that contribute to mental health outcomes. This narrative review examines the gender-specific stressors that affect mental health and well-being in women athletes, some of which are modifiable. Psychosocial stressors identified include exposure to violence, be it psychological, physical or sexual in nature, which can result in a myriad of acute and long-lasting symptoms; and inequities as reflected in pay disparities, under-representation in the media, fewer opportunities in leadership positions and implications associated with family planning and motherhood. Strategies to promote mental health in women athletes should be considered, and where possible, should proactively address gender-specific stressors likely to influence mental health in order to maximise positive outcomes in women athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Over the past five decades, the number of people from refugee backgrounds in developed countries has been on the constant rise. Although the field of refugee and forced migration studies in relation to education and sport has grown considerably in recent years, very little is known about refugee-background students' perceptions of Physical Education (PE). Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate refugee-background students' perceptions of PE in Swedish high schools, using a salutogenic approach. Participants and settings: This qualitative study was conducted in two Swedish high schools and involved eleven students from refugee backgrounds aged 16–18 years (seven boys and four girls) who originated from a variety of countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia and Albania. Data collection/analysis: A total of 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted, and the interviews were systematically coded and analyzed using the sense of coherence (SOC) components as analytical tools. Findings: Three themes were identified that captured the students' perceptions and experiences: (1) PE was perceived as more meaningful in Sweden than in their country of origin due to short-term benefits (e.g. social interaction with friends, and improving personal health and wellbeing) and long-term benefits (e.g. learning for the future); (2) understanding the rules and purpose of the activities helped students to better comprehend the experiences acquired in PE and communicate with others; and (3) constructive social relationships with teachers and classmates were an essential resource in order to make PE manageable. Implications: We suggest that strengths-based approaches should be recognized and incorporated into PE in order to facilitate health promoting factors and wellbeing among students from refugee backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a body of research that indicates the need for community-driven and culturally responsive pedagogies in sport-based interventions. There is much to learn from the pedagogical approaches and experiences of African Australian refugee-background coaches who work with refugee-background young people toward acceptance and affirmation of their cultural and racial identities. This paper explores African Australian refugee-background coaches' pedagogies in working with African Australian refugee-background young people in a grassroots football programme in Melbourne. Participants included an African Australian refugee-background young woman and four coaches. Data collection spanned a six-month period and included observations and semi-structured interviews. The findings were analysed using Ladson-Billings' [Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465; Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dreamkeepers : Successful teachers of African American children. Jossey-Bass Publishers; Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. The Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751] conceptualisation of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. The study identified three main themes. First, the coaches considered themselves 'barrier breakers': they were able to connect the African Australian refugee-background young people to different resources in and outside of sports contexts to develop their success in football and in life. Second, the coaches considered the sport programme 'a family' where they were willing to nurture and support cultural competence by sharing power with the participants and their community. Third, the coaches created spaces for young people to develop awareness that allowed them to critique some of the social inequities experienced. Future studies should continue to move beyond a focus on predominantly white and middle-class providers and coaches in sport-based interventions. By including and foregrounding the voices of coaches who have diverse experiences, more diverse cultural knowledges are validated, enabling the translation of this knowledge into more culturally responsive sport programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically interrogates the 'integrative potential' of football by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that includes 84 semi-structured interviews with refugees, asylum seekers and local community organizations, and five interviews with representatives of national football associations across Southeast Europe, a region that has hitherto been under-examined in this field of research. The results show the uneasy and strained relationship between football and integration, characterized by incongruity between micro-level practices and experiences of solidarity and inclusion, and State-sponsored marginality and deterrence taking place in Southeast Europe. We provide empirical evidence for social connections, facilitators (i.e. language and communication, safety and stability), and rights as relevant, meaningful and challenging domains of integration in the context of football. We conclude that foundational rights, and hence dehumanizing policies and discourses, need to be addressed if the proclaimed 'integrative potential' of football is to be realized beyond social connections and sporadic examples of access to decent work through football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collaborative self-study explores the ethical ambiguities and dilemmas that emerged in participatory action research (PAR) with refugee-background young people in a grassroots football programme. The project comprised a six-month PAR in a football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Participants included the first author and 13 African Australian refugee-background young women. The ethical issues encountered concerned: (a) challenges of negotiating identities and the ethics and politics of knowledge production; (b) dilemmas in the collective struggle against, and resistance to, forms of oppression; and (c) the need to share power and the accompanying fear of losing research control. We recommend that PAR projects with refugee-background young people consider critical ethic of care as a framework for anticipating and navigating ethical issues that may arise. Such a framework can give form to sensitive conversations to reveal power relations, capture complexities and contradictions inherent within caring, and guide collective practices towards recovering dignity and equity within PAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In introducing the Sport in Society special issue, this paper aims to extend and deepen conversations among scholars, policy makers and practitioners about the role of sport in relation to contexts and issues of forced migration. The five themes that cut across the contributions to this special issue address and expand existing and emerging concerns in the literature, specifically focusing on: 1) participatory methodologies, power, voice and ethics; 2) emotions and embodiment; 3) gendered, socio-ecological and intersectional perspectives; 4) critical perspectives on integration and intercultural communication; and 5) fandom and media representations of forced migrants in elite sport. Often contributing to several of these themes at once, the papers in this special issue critically analyse and interrogate the implications of existing approaches, practices, and research around sport and forced migration. They do so by engaging with complex, yet necessary, dialogues and perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries, and by not shying away from conceptual and ethical tensions that interrogate concepts, methodologies, policies and forms of representation regarding forced migrants' experiences and contributions to global sporting cultures. While not (cl)aiming to exhaustively address the wide variety of issues and contexts that are relevant to the relationship between sport and forced migration, the papers in this special issue provide key contributions to advance critical scholarly analyses and inform applied interventions on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport is widely utilised as an integration tool for refugee-background young people in resettlement countries, with a concomitant research focus on the implementation and outcomes of health and integration initiatives. However, a narrow focus on integration as the context and outcome of sport participation limits our understanding of the wider role sport plays as a sphere of belonging for refugee-background young people. By taking a wider view of football that includes fandom, informal participation, and community sport, we can gain important insights into how it functions as a mobile, transnational sphere of belonging that can, for some, provide a continuous sense of embodied, affective, practical, and sociocultural belonging in the face of multiple migrations and transitions. Drawing on three ethnographic and participatory studies conducted with refugee-background young people in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands, this article explores the ways in which engagement with football both precedes and exceeds integration in the everyday lives of refugee-background young people. The authors demonstrate the need to place instrumental sports-based integration approaches in a wider transnational and historical context, and to attend to the wider affordances of sport for refugee-background young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the concept of mental health recovery to critically examine three football projects in the United Kingdom and their effects on the recovery process. Drawing on qualitative research on the lived experiences of mental health clients and service providers across the three projects, we explore the role of football in relation to three components of recovery: engagement, stigma, and social isolation. The findings indicate how the projects facilitated increased client engagement, peer supports, and the transformation of self-stigma. The perception of football as an alternative setting away from the clinical environment was an important factor in this regard. Yet, the results also reveal major limitations, including the narrow, individualistic conceptualization of both recovery and stigma within the projects, the reliance on a biomedical model of mental illness, and the potentially adverse consequences of using football in mental health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research question : This paper aims to provide new insights into why community sports volunteers engage with intellectual disability as a form of diversity, and how these drivers impact on the opportunities and activities provided for athletes with intellectual disabilities. Research methods : The authors use a critical diversity management framework, combined with theoretical tenets of ableism, to explore volunteers' engagement with disability. The paper draws on a ten-month ethnographic study undertaken in a community sports club in Melbourne, Australia, that had recently introduced two specialist teams for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Results and findings : The findings indicate the business case for diversity as a driver for the club to engage with sport for people with intellectual disabilities; this, in turn, created tension and conflict amongst volunteers, resulting in a separation of the disability team from the main club activity. Implications : Ableist discourses underpinned the business case for diversity held by some club volunteers, resulting in the disability team not being integrated into the club as part of its core business. Policy makers and advocates of diversity must critically consider the drivers of clubs for engaging in the different areas of diversity, and how this might impact on provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport for development research increasingly seeks to move beyond a focus on evidence of sport for development outcomes to better understand the mechanisms and contexts that underpin these outcomes. Building on recent innovations in micro-sociology, which highlight the role of emotions and bodily entrainment in face-to-face interactions, this paper critically examines, and aims to progress, efforts to open the 'black box' of sport for development outcomes and impacts. The authors argue that the theoretical and methodological merits of radical micro-sociology, and interaction ritual theory in particular, enable important advances in the field of sport for development. The paper proposes micro-sociological questions and practical directions for sport for development research but also outlines the limitations of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Current literature suggests that community sport contributes to social cohesion. Yet, empirical research is still scant, and existing conceptualizations of social cohesion in the context of community sport are dominated by a social capital approach emphasizing the individual over the structural conditions that need to be addressed if social cohesion is to be achieved. This article aims to provide more insight into how social cohesion is operationalized in community sport practices. Qualitative research on the practical understandings of community sport practitioners was undertaken across three cities in Flanders, Belgium. The findings suggest that practitioners adopt both individual and structural understandings of social cohesion. Moreover, they experience that their efforts to develop a structural approach are pressured by a dominant individualized approach. These findings reveal a disjuncture between academic constructs of social cohesion and the practical understandings of community sport practitioners. The article proposes ways to address the need for the empirical and conceptual development of social cohesion in the context of community sport and the broader community development field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how multiculturalism is enacted and negotiated among Brazilian and Portuguese migrants at a football (soccer) club in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The authors use the lens of everyday multiculturalism to analyse the tension between public expectations about intercultural 'mixing' and actual intercultural engagement in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss how club members negotiate the national discourse that recognises cultural differences yet prescribes intercultural mixing in the public sphere. The findings show that meeting co-ethnics is one of the club members' primary motivations for participating in the football club, whereas interacting with people with culturally diverse backgrounds is not a leitmotif. Everyday group-making practices among Portuguese and Brazilian players reinforce group boundaries and constrain intercultural interaction, thereby challenging normative multiculturalism that prescribes ethnic mixing. The paper concludes that members' multicultural presentation of their club provides a socially accepted environment for ethnically concentrated sport participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interventions aimed at increasing the participation of young people with disabilities in recreational sport have had mixed success. The authors draw on in-depth interviews with representatives from State Sporting Associations, local government officers and volunteers within community sports clubs in Victoria, Australia, to examine why some sports clubs are unable or unwilling to translate policy ambitions into practice. The findings indicate how by framing disability provision as 'too difficult', 'not core business' and antithetical to competitive success, community sports clubs are able to resist policy ambitions to modify existing structures and develop more inclusive practice. Greater priority needs to be given to transformational inclusion objectives and challenging ableism if clubs are to structurally progress the development of participation opportunities for young people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in 2012, 'the Seekers' are a football club in Melbourne, Australia. Initially set up to provide social recreation for various refugees and asylum seekers, the Seekers have more recently entered a team in the mainstream league competition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers how football facilitates forms of social inclusion for team members, both in relation to the action of the sport and the political and social context of Australian society more broadly. In many ways the field of sport is highly contested as players engage with the mainstream; however the solidarity forged through playing creates the possibility for moments of social inclusion in other ways. The capacity of sporting interactions to facilitate social inclusion for male team members is vexed, though there is evidence to suggest that, in the correct conditions, sport can contribute to an individual's capacity to access employment and educational opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport participation has been shown to be associated with health and social benefits. However, there are persisting inequities and barriers to sport participation that can prevent children and young people with diverse backgrounds and abilities from accessing these benefits. This mixed methods study investigated how diversity is understood, experienced and managed in junior sport. The study combined in-depth interviews (n = 101), surveys (n = 450) and observations over a three-year period. The results revealed that a focus on performance and competitiveness negatively affected junior sports clubs’ commitment to diversity and inclusive participation. Gender and a range of attitudes about diversity were also strongly related. On average, we found that those who identified as men were more likely to support a pro-performance stance, be homophobic, endorse stricter gender roles, and endorse violence as a natural masculine trait. In addition, those who identified as men were less likely to hold pro-disability attitudes. These findings suggest that the participation-performance tension and gender affect to what extent, and how, sports clubs engage children and young people with diverse backgrounds and abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the concept of aesthetic formation to examine the practices through which diasporic imaginations become tangible and experienced as 'real'. The authors interpret sport as an embodied aesthetic practice through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for identification and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on a transnational community-based sports event, the Amsterdam Futsal Tournament, the paper discusses how articulations of Somali diasporism become tangible and embodied in subjects who participate in this event. The authors conclude that these materialisation practices can simultaneously elicit multiple forms and levels of belonging that also foster a sense of integration and belonging to the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German (junior) elite football, there are a comparatively large number of highly talented players with a migrant background. These players were born in Germany and joined the Talent Development Programme of the German Football Association (DFB). Many of these players can decide for which national association they want to play in international games. In media and public discourse, this decision is usually explained by the degree of self-identification with a specific ethnic group. However, this assumption is not empirically evident. Using the example of junior elite players with a Turkish background, this article focuses therefore on the question, which role ethnic identity plays in this decision. Based on social identity theory, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 adolescent elite football players with Turkish background who played for the German and/or the Turkish Football Association. Our findings suggest that - in contrast to media narratives - ethnic identity only plays a marginal role in the decision to play for a national football association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the role of informal sport within attempts to increase sport participation. Informal sport is a contested concept that government and non-government agencies are grappling with. In this article, the focus is on participation that is self-organised and not club based. The research reported reflects that at present, policy makers and practitioners have not seriously considered how informal sport may be positioned as a central facet in efforts to respond to participation objectives and associated health and social policy agendas. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with stakeholders responsible for promoting community sport participation in Victoria, Australia, the authors explore some of the tensions and challenges that stakeholders experience in supporting and managing informal sport. The findings indicate that current practices limit the potential of informal sport. Drawing on concepts from collaborative governance, the article concludes that changes to both culture and practices within sport development systems are required in order for stakeholders to harness the potential of informal participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Playing sports has long been a taboo for women in Colombia, yet new spaces for female participation have emerged in recent decades. This article explores the gendered nature of sport in Colombia through the lived experiences of female participants involved in a local Sport for Development and Peace organization. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and a decolonial feminist perspective, the authors examine how cultural experiences of physicality are gendered but are potentially changing in the context of leisure practices and how this may shape power relations. Although more girls and women are participating in masculine leisure pursuits, there are critical limitations to social change and female participants demonstrate the coloniality of gender in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]