Sport and Social Inequality: Recent Canadian Research on Sport Participation.

Despite the enduring, naïve and self-serving mantra that 'sport and politics should not mix', overwhelming evidence suggests that they are always mutually implicated. This is particularly the case with respect to social inequalities that, in Canadian society, are not only reflected in patterns of sport participation, but also implicated in helping to reproduce those social inequalities. But it is also evident that sport has been a platform for challenging social inequalities and for resisting those reproductive patterns. In this paper, I outline how recognition of the right to participate in sport and recreational physical activity has been recognized increasingly since the 1960s, and how patterns of participation in Canada indicate the uneven way in which that right has been realized; point out some ways in which those patterns of sport participation are implicated in the social reproduction of social inequalities; and conclude by pointing to some ways in which sport has been involved in resisting and challenging inequalities, and how the right to participate in sport and physical activity may be better realized in Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]