In recent times, role modelling and inspiration has been foregrounded as an important function of elite female athlete social media use (Pocock & Skey, 2024; Reference to Author Removed). However, academic research has predominantly focused on athletes’ digital practices in terms of what they post online. This is mainly explored through athlete branding and commercial frameworks (see Arai et al., 2014), with emphasis placed upon marketable self-presentations to attract sponsorship (Pegoraro, 2010). This paper moves beyond these economic narratives to develop a sociocultural and political understanding of elite female athletes’ perceptions of social media. Specifically, through semi-structured interviews, the paper explores how athletes construct ‘imagined audiences’ (Litt, 2012), particularly imagining women and girls as their primary audience and how this shapes their usage of social media. Findings demonstrate that inspiration is framed as an ethical and cultural responsibility rather than a branding strategy, and that imagined audiences are shaped by gendered norms, institutional expectations, and the politics of visibility in women’s sport. The paper argues that elite female athletes’ social media practices reflect complex forms of identity negotiation and cultural labour, highlighting the need to reorient scholarly attention toward the social and symbolic dimensions of digital sporting cultures.

This paper stems from conversations about tension that runners with sight loss and sighted guides experience regarding guided running workshops, which are typically designed to promote safe and enjoyable practices. On the one hand, runners value these workshops as introductory tools that teach ‘logical’ principles and ‘rational’ approaches to safe and enjoyable guiding relationships. On the other hand, the runners recognise clear limitations: these standardised courses often leave little room for idiosyncrasy and personal familiarity, particularly in relation to ‘sensing’ safety, comfort, and enjoyment. Building on this tension, I situate these concerns within broader neoliberal approaches in most Global Northern public domains, where human relationships are increasingly managed, audited, and standardised. I argue that such tendencies transform elements of social life into clear, logical, and rational frameworks– ones that are accountable, auditable, and assessable through training. Drawing on conversations with runners, I illustrate how these courses necessarily tell a partial story – safety and joy in guided running arise from a complex and nuanced connection to ‘more-than-rational’ ways of knowing– both through rational thought and through ‘sensing’. In the conclusion, I address the critical question: how can we include ‘sensory knowing’ in workshops on positive, pleasant and productive guided running?

An ongoing debate exists on the role of sport for fostering hope in the lives of marginalized communities. While one side argues a danger of evangelical belief on hope as a solution to social problems (Coalter, 2013), the other argues that sport can be a source of beneficial hope for transformational outcomes (Stone, 2018).
This paper presents the case of the ongoing Mediterranean crossings, where asylum-seekers go through deadly journeys to reach safety in Europe. It explores how the interplay between hope and football shapes their journeys, and how the widely popularized dreams of football success can result in extreme consequences for those willing to pursue them. It does so by taking into account primary data (n=29 refugee participants) and secondary biographical data, of both accomplished footballers and aspiring footballers with a refugee background.
Results show that there is a crucial necessity to acknowledge the multiplicity of identities and experiences contained within the refugee label. Attempts to associate refugees with conditions of stardom can be counterproductive towards beneficial outcomes, to the extent of being dangerous. Nonetheless, not all hope should be lost. The paper presents alternative avenues to better address the concept of hope in football for refugee well-being.

This article provides an in-depth investigation of people seeking asylum’s development of senses of belonging in and through solidarity grassroots football in Italy. In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in sport and migration studies. Yet, researchers have predominantly focused on policy-oriented questions (i.e., how can sport facilitate integration?). Through an ethnographic approach, this article examines processes of negotiation that take place in the microscale of day-to-day life in the locality. Employing the analytical framework for the study of belonging advanced by Nira Yuval-Davis and critically integrated by Marco Antonsich, four themes are discussed: the agency of people seeking asylum in appropriating football to nurture a positive sense of self; the emergence of the material environment of sporting activities as a space of belonging; the negotiation of belonging within and beyond the team; and the local neighbourhood as possible trait d’union between sport-specific attachments and development of senses of belonging to the wider community. The article contends that involvement in solidarity grassroots football can provide people seeking asylum with opportunities to develop attachments that go beyond the momentary, and play a vital role in resisting the liminality imposed by nationalist-autochthonic politics of belonging.

Sports clubs may be an ideal setting for social integration for people from different backgrounds. Using heuristic multilevel models, prior studies linked the individual characteristics of the members with social structures at the club context (e.g. club goals) to explain social integration. However, due the organization of sport activities in teams, another social context with distinct social structures (e.g. team culture) exists within clubs that is likely relevant for social integration as well. Based on data from 1515 members in 145 teams of 42 Swiss football clubs, this study analyses social integration in the dimension of identification in a three-level multilevel model that is the first to include the team context as a level of analysis. The results revealed that teams differ considerably in the social integration of their members. Besides individual factors (e.g. education level, membership duration), a team culture of social togetherness and especially a pronounced team sociability are relevant for identification. Cross-level interactions showed that these factors play a role for members independent of their migration background. Yet, additional positive effects exist for members new to the club. Based on these results, sport club researchers should consider including the team level in multilevel analyses.

This research will demonstrate how Norbert Elias’ figurational theory gives an alternative theoretical framework to explore the relationship between sport and religion. This study will use Tottenham Hotspur Football Club as a case study and will explore supporters’ opinions and feelings on the clubs publicised connection to the Jewish religion, using Elias’s ‘personal pronoun’ model and the ‘established-outsiders’ concept. This study recruited (n=596) Tottenham Hotspur football fans via social media to participate in an online survey. Additional follow-up, unstructured interviews (n=10) were completed to gain in-depth, qualitative data. Three themes emerged as a result of thematic analysis: ‘embracing the Jewish community’, ‘sport and religion’, and ‘community’. Overall, many fans were proud of their Jewish heritage and community, while others argued that sport and religion are unrelated. Fans recognised similarities between sport fandom and religion, such as the sense of community and belonging they feel when surrounded by their co-religionists or football fans.

This study investigates the role of informal sport setting (self-organized and not voluntary sport club) in the social integration of Ethiopian and Eritrean women in Swiss society. Ager & and Strang, (2004) indicator of integration framework is used to examine how social connection dynamic serves as a facilitator of social integration. Thematic analysis (Braun, Clarke, Weate, 2016) was applied to analysis the semi-structured interviews and focus groups discussion (n=12, 18-51 years old) to understand the interplay between participation and social integration. The findings indicate that such setting has become crucial sphere for establishing rebuilding social contact, support system and place of belonging (i.e. maintaining and celebrating one’s cultural identity). The social contact in particular has strengthened their integration within the migrant community as well as with the local community. Furthermore, it also facilitates access to useful information, resources and service regarding housing, education, employment and health services. However, it is important to note that the social integration into the local community in setting with is rather weak and limited, in some cases one-sided. Racism and discrimination on and off the field of sport continue to intensify existing social boundaries.

Getting ‘back to nature’ is the premise of a range of physical cultural practices that have become popular and profitable in the past decade. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo Diet each call back to premodern ideals about nature, the body, and society, championing the naturality of functional fitness, the primacy of pre-agricultural diets, and the primordiality of mud as antidotes to the ills of modern life. This essay names ‘back to nature’ fitness and argues that it emerges as part of a proliferate social discourse concerning what it means to be human, at a moment when the status of the human is being called into question by environmental uncertainty. ‘Back to nature fitness’ evokes a nostalgia for a state of premodern innocence, mounts a critique of modern sedentariness, ‘abominable’ foods and other ‘sins’ of civilisation, and suggests that purity can be rekindled through ascetic, embodied practice. I argue that this shared philosophy is underpinned by a modernistic understanding of human history, one beset by troublesome dualisms yet strengthened by the symbolic power of the human body to act as a proxy for ‘nature’ itself. More broadly, I show why sociologists should beware this physical cultural primitivism in attempts to analyse the complexity of nature in physical culture, and suggest impurity to be a more accurate and ethical mode of understanding body-environment relations.

Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice explains how institutions – specifically for this paper, sports media – influence the taken-for-granted assumptions of one’s habitus. Sportswomen receive less media coverage than sportsmen, yet the influence that this has on young people is under-researched. Using a mixed method approach, combining the results of a content and narrative analysis of 2514 articles and 2051 photographs from four UK online media outlets (BBC Sport, The Guardian, Sky Sports News, Twitter Moments) with interviews with 70 young people (33 males and 37 females; aged 15-16 years) from three schools in North East England, this paper explores how sports-media messages are interpreted within the framework of a gendered habitus. Two empirical themes emerged: firstly, young people expect female athletes to be underrepresented and sexualised in sports-media, affecting how sport is constructed as unimportant for females for the accrual of social capital. Secondly, media messages which promote female attractiveness are internalised within young people’s habitus. The adolescent gendered habitus is influenced by media messages: the prioritisation of sportsmen leads to young women viewing sport as ‘not for them’. The role of sport within a gendered habitus reflects hegemonic masculinity which promotes sport for men and stereotypical femininity for women.

This article will explore how karate practitioners sensorally participate in space within mixed sex karate practice. By exploring in turn how karate practitioners move through physical space, assert their voice, and exude or cover up odors seeping from their bodies into the shared space of the karate hall, this paper will highlight the integral role of our sensory experiences in presenting and developing a gendered embodiment, and gendered ways of utilising space. I will suggest that the unisex practice of karate particularly enables women karate practitioners to ‘undo’ conventional gendered embodiment, through embracing spatially assertive and commanding uses of their bodies. The extent to which women’s gendered embodiment is ‘undone’ is both at times inhibited by men’s dominating uses of space in the karate hall, and magnified by virtue building a karate embodiment in a shared space with men. This research both highlights the potential of sports practice to ‘undo’ conventional gendered embodiments that particularly restrict women’s intentionality in the world (Young, 1980), and power of sensorally-attuned research to illuminate the minute ways in which unequal gender relations are naturalised, legitimised, and done.

Sport and participation in sport has become an important welfare policy and is seen to contribute positively to society and the individual. Simultaneously there has also been an increased interest in turning sport and sport policy to a relevant object of study and evaluation. This study draws on the concept of governmentality to examine one such evaluative activity, the new Swedish sport policy evaluation system that emerged in 2010. The purpose is to elucidate the forms of knowledge and methods for generating knowledge about sport participation and the (non)sport participant. The analysis demonstrate three strategies of evaluation and governing; strategies of representation, deliberation and reflexivity. The argument being proposed in this article is that these three strategies draw on different yet overlapping forms of knowledge and methods of generating knowledge about sport participation and thereby also produce different (non)sport participant subject positions.

As match-fixing has emerged as a global problem, states and sports organisations have proposed a range of countermeasures. Despite their neutral, technocratic appearance, these instruments produce their own political effects. This study examines how match-fixing countermeasures (re)organise the power relations within the sports betting industry. Drawing from a case study of the 2011 South Korean ‘K-league’ football match-fixing scandal that resulted in an exhaustive raft of countermeasures, three consequences are suggested. First, the education programme redefines sports ethics by delivering new codes of conduct that are strategically aligned to the demands of betting. Second, regulations instituted by the K-League and the government frame the illegal activity as infringing upon the key stakeholders’ economic interests, further privileging the importance of the betting. Third, the Early Warning System empowers the controversial betting operator as a trustworthy ‘fixer’ of the match-fixing problem by co-opting it into the policy network as an authorised monitor. Consequently, this study shows that, using the countermeasures, key stakeholders could not only manage the risk of losing legitimacy by showcasing their efforts to fight against match-fixing, but take advantage of the countermeasures to normalise the business of sports betting and further their interests.

Global health organisations exert homogenising pressure on national discourse concerning the promotion of physical activity (PA). Simultaneously, a main feature of the contemporary health-related promotion of PA is the disqualification of sport as a medium of health (Michelini, 2013).
A theoretical framework based on systems theory (Luhmann, 1985) has been used here to explore the pervasiveness of the disqualification of sport in five countries. The empirical analysis examines and compares the content (Mayring, 2003) of 25 documents on the promotion of PA issued by the ministries of health in the USA, Sweden, Germany, France and Italy. These countries are representative of different welfare state typologies (Esping-Andersen, 1990): liberal, Scandinavian and conservative, respectively.
The results show a similarly sport-hostile discourse in conservative and Scandinavian countries, but not in the liberal case study. American strategies are, at least to some extent, more sport-friendly. This does not contradict the existence of an influential global discourse on the promotion of PA which disqualifies sport as a medium of health. For instance, the case studies share much similar content and a common rhetoric. Nevertheless, the case of the USA shows that national health discourses still display some degree of adaptation and dissimilarities. The mechanisms at the root of the differences in national discourse on the health-related promotion of PA constitute a relevant topic for further analyses.

In recent decades, sport has become more and more important as an occupational field, due to the increasing differentiation and commercialisation of sports. This paper will analyse to what extent these developments are associated with destandardisation processes at the time when sports science graduates embark on their professional career. For this purpose, continuous professional trajectories were gathered from a sample of n = 742 sport science graduates from all Swiss universities, to provide retrospective longitudinal data for the complete cohorts (1984/85, 1994/95 and 2004/05). Optimal matching analysis was used to reveal underlying structures, after which the cohorts were compared to check any tendencies towards destandardisation empirically. Only a minority of all Swiss sports scientists is affected by destandardisation tendencies. There is no noteworthy increase in the variety of sequential pat-terns over time; instead, the normal occupational career remains clearly pronounced across all three cohorts. If anything, a tendency towards destandardised occupational careers may be observed in the field of schools.

Sport has become a highly differentiated social phenomenon in recent years and over the past decades there has been a considerable increase in the social significance of sport. Changes in society, for example individualization, or the growing significance of the health and body culture, or changing values, are consid-ered to be generative mechanisms for increasing social importance and the differen-tiation of modern sport. As a consequence, the classic model of traditional competi-tive sport is being supplemented by individualistic and hedonistic sport forms. Al-though discussions in sport sociology attribute the changes observed in recent dec-ades of sport participation to a socially determined differentiation of sport, this prem-ise has hardly ever been empirically tested. The present study examines to what ex-tent the postulated developments in sport can be observed on a micro level of those engaging in sport, by examining sport behaviour from a contemporary historical per-spective. Based on a life-course approach to research, a total of 1,739 over-50-year-olds in Germany were asked about their sport participation in a retrospective longitu-dinal study. Results show that the increasing differentiation of sport can be docu-mented by the more diversified forms of individual sport careers. During a 30-year observation period the popularity of competitive sport decreased and the variety of ways in which sport was organized increased. A differentiated analysis based on ex-amining three birth cohorts showed that the reported change in sport participation can be attributed to age, cohort, and period effects. In addition, the present study ex-amines how specific events in contemporary history are reflected in individual sport careers. Sport careers in Chemnitz (Eastern Germany) and Braunschweig (Western Germany) differed before German reunification, and these differences have evened out after the political change and the process of transformation.