Browse

Drawing on an extensive archive of media texts collected between 2014 and 2019, we trace shifting representations of the National Football League in discourse on painkiller use among its players. We argue that in contrast to earlier eras, an image of the league as an exploitative and corrupt institution has come to the fore. Clustered around the announcement of a series of player lawsuits, these discourses are tempered by the persistence of narratives of personal responsibility and the elision of racial logics that predetermine athletes’ subjection to pain and injury. Situating our analysis in the context of the drug wars and the profit motive of the National Football League, we argue that these discourses both reflect and contribute to the workings of racial capitalism across the professional football and pharmaceutical industries.

Despite French policies promoting sports for girls in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, gender inequalities in practice persist in these areas. Based on the sociology of socialization and Connell’s concept of gender regimes, this article proposes to analyze the effects of sports contexts on the (dis)engagement of girls going through the process of joining a club. The data stem from a number of ethnographic investigations (observations; interviews with athletes [girls and boys] aged 11–17, trainers, and parents, n = 42) conducted in three French disadvantaged urban neighborhoods in three different cities over a total of 5 years of field work. All the sports clubs of the neighborhoods studied were investigated. The results reveal that the forms of socialization favored by the club and the trainers of teenagers might structure feminine interrelationships either favorable to girls’ practice (as in gymnastics) or unfavorable, indeed conflictual (as in soccer).

This study examined the way college football players used social media to resist, highlight, and address inequity in college football. Employing a critical discourse analysis guided by poststructuralism as a theoretical framework, three public statements were analyzed to explore how the language used in the statements resisted multiple discourses that shape college football players’ experiences. The ways that college football players used discourse to mobilize as activists and exert control over their college athlete experience were considered. These findings highlight three consistent themes and expand research on college athlete activism through social media and language analysis.

On April 6, 2018, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team was traveling to a playoff game on a rural highway when their bus collided with a semitrailer truck, killing 16 people. The crash led to an unparalleled, nation-wide outpouring of mourning. The legacy of the crash has been sustained by media outlets such as The Sports Network, who released a documentary on the crash, 29 Forever. Through an affective reading of 29 Forever, this paper explores the processes by which the Humboldt bus crash came to be known and felt as a national tragedy, how the crash fits within larger practices of Canadian nation-making, and the role that hockey, emotion, and feelings play in these processes.

We situate the race-based division of Manitoba’s Keystone Junior Hockey League as a case study to reveal the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We argue that this split is an example of “White settler possessive logics,” whereby settler belonging is naturalized through reiterative embodied acts of occupation. That this split happened in hockey, which is colloquially referred to as “Canada’s game,” is perhaps unsurprising given that hockey is a significant cultural site where Canadian nationhood is produced. However, we also contend that settler entitlement and belonging are never fully secure, but rather always in the process of (un)becoming. Settler belonging is thus threatened by Indigenous embodied sovereignties, which we argue can be found in the game of hockey generally, and in the Keystone Junior Hockey League specifically.