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Safe space—a physical and psychosocial space cultivated through social relations—can be vital for youth programs and community development. This paper analyzes youth participants’ experiences in a Canadian bicycle program. The authors suggest that the program can be seen as a form of “Sport for Development,” and specifically what the authors term “Bicycles for Development”—as the bicycle is considered as a possible catalyst for development. Using interviews and photos, the role of “safe space” in the growing body of Bicycles for Development literature is highlighted, and the authors make a connection between Sport for Development scholarship and literature related to youth cultural activities and spaces. The findings reveal the benefits associated with program engagement and challenges despite program-related benefits.

Understandings of who plays college sports are dominated by assumptions that lack academic scrutiny. Using the Education Longitudinal Study (N = 7,810) and multilevel modeling, this study examines the extent to which high school indicators of family socioeconomic statuses, athletic development and merit, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts predict the likelihood of becoming a college athlete. The authors find evidence that supports our understanding of the process of becoming a college athlete being shaped by family socioeconomic status. Still, high school sport participation characteristics, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts also seem to offer independent contributions to the odds of becoming a college athlete. Overall, these results suggest that college athletic opportunities are not simply a function of athletic merit, based on unique analyses of quantitative empirical evidence from a large national sample of high school students.

This paper examines the role of collective memory in the protection of “traditional” sociocultural and symbolic aspects of football vis-à-vis the processes of commodification and globalization. Empirical evidence that underpins the analysis is drawn from a multisite ethnographic study of football fan activism in the Czech Republic, Italy, and England, as well as at the European level. The authors argue that collective memory represents a significant component of the supporters’ mobilization and is related to the protection of specific football sites of memory, including club names, logos, colors, places, heroes, tragedies, and histories. The authors further explain that collective memory operates through three interconnected dimensions: embedded collective memory, transcendent collective memory, and the collective memory of contentious politics.

Recent high-profile incidents involving racism at hockey’s highest levels have cast serious concerns regarding the prevalence of racism in the sport. However, limited scholarly literature has examined the prevalence of racism in Canadian hockey across the lesser-known competitive developmental levels (e.g., junior, collegiate, and minor-professional). Employing a critical race framework, we interviewed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) regarding their experiences with racism in Canadian hockey. The findings reveal that actions that keep BIPOC players on the outside looking in exist at even the sport’s youngest levels. The findings also indicate that governing bodies often fail to protect BIPOC players when racist incidents occur. Further research regarding racism in hockey is needed to more fully understand the deleterious impact of racist behavior on the sport and those who play it, and to identify strategies that can promote a more egalitarian opportunity structure than currently exists.

Sport is increasingly being used by individuals, charities, and corporate sponsors as a means of acquiring donors and fundraisers to support a variety of social and health causes. This paper examines five key features of fitness philanthropy that when considered together provide new sociological insight into a unique social phenomenon. These are: (a) peer-to-peer giving, (b) social media accounts of embodied philanthropy, (c) community connection and making a difference, (d) fitness philanthropy as social capital, and (e) charity and corporate giving. The significance of the paper is threefold. First, it highlights the ways in which fitness philanthropy points to the changing nature of sport, leisure, and physical activity, whereby fundraising is a key motivation for participation. Second, it examines the types of “empathy paths” created by fitness philanthropy with its emphasis on the body, social media, and peer-to-peer forms of organizational giving. Third, the paper seeks to answer critical questions about fitness philanthropy in the context of neoliberalism and “caring capitalism.” Bringing these themes into dialogue with broader research on the intersections between sport and charity adds to the body of sociological research on sport, philanthropy, well-being, and civic engagement by addressing novel conceptual frameworks for the embodied expression of these concerns.

Since the concept of redeveloping Wrigley Field became prevalent, the Chicago Tribune has notably constructed a variety of narrative strands on related urban dynamics. Through a framework that connected post-Gramsci insights of hegemony, discourse, and critics of spatial and economic neoliberalism, this study examined how the newspaper strategically assembled discourses in mediatizing urban politics surrounding the Wrigley renovation. First, the newspaper fostered hegemonic consent that endorsed the redevelopment(s) by promoting old tropes of economic development and market growth despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Second, it also produced a parallel discourse that expressed moderate recognition and sympathy to the interest and experience of the community. Without fundamentally challenging neoliberal power, however, such discursive construction was a strategic and instrumental intervention that reinforced the contingencies and boundaries of neoliberal hegemony. Through such investigations, this study shed light on the ongoing rearticulation(s) of the media regime that strategically produced neoliberal rationalities, subjectivities, and discursive antagonism as it assisted to shape urban imageries and political economies of sporting spaces.

Women have been entering the sports journalism industry in growing numbers around the world but are still oftentimes sidelined. Female sport media workers constantly face more challenges than their male counterparts because of unfriendly working environments and conditions based in sexism. Most of the existing research has been conducted in Anglo-Saxon environments; yet, women’s inclusion and exclusion in the sport industry is an international problem. This case study expands the literature through in-depth interviews with the only two Ghanaian journalists who covered the FIFA World Cup 2018. These two Ghanaians, the only representatives of their country in the media in Russia, were women, a unique situation that deserved to be examined to better understand the place of women in sport media.

In contrast to the sex-segregated model that dominates sport and contributes to its tradition of hegemonic masculinity, collegiate track and field typically follows a sex-integrated structure whereby men and women train, travel, and compete together. In this article, the authors examined how six collegiate male track-and-field athletes who are part of a sex-integrated team navigate gendered norms and hierarchies with a particular focus on their understandings of gender(ed) performance and abilities. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist framework, the authors’ analysis found that although the participants were accepting of a sex-integrated training environment and challenged some gender stereotypes and instances of sexism, they simultaneously reified these same gender stereotypes by characterizing women athletes as “emotional” or “less competitive” and advocated individual solutions to institutional sexism.