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The avant-garde has much to offer sport studies and many paths to explore for sport studies’ scholars. In this article, I makes a case for the use of the avant-garde as a metaphor for sport studies, sport scholars, and the public at large. To do this, I sketch out some of the foundational and pertinent characteristics of the avant-garde, provides exemplars from art, considers the similarities between sport and art (in terms of an avant-garde metaphor), and provides some exemplars from sport.

In the United Kingdom, significant changes have occurred in the Paralympic media production environment and style of Paralympic broadcasting. Given the generative nature of media texts on cultural representation, the authors explore the circulation of disability narratives in contemporary Paralympic media coverage. Drawing on an integrated data set that brings together textual analysis and audience perceptions, the authors highlight the presence of three disability narratives, termed: extraordinary normalcy, ableist rehabilitation, and sporting ablenationalism. The authors unpack the ways these three narratives differ from the widely and commonly used “supercrip” critique and discuss the implications of these narratives, and the wider cultural discourses and dialogue they generate, in terms of inclusion/exclusion and progressive social change.

In October 2018, Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op publicly asked, “Do white people dominate the outdoors?” and acknowledged that their representations were “part of [a] problem.” Relying on Ahmed’s theorizations of diversity work, this paper offers an intersectional interrogation of Mountain Equipment Co-op’s (MEC’s) commitment to including more “diversity” in their representations and considers how both MEC’s statement and their early efforts to diversify simultaneously efface the gendered, ableist, fatphobic, settler colonial and racist structuring of “the outdoors” both in MEC’s practices and in “Canada” more broadly. Our analysis highlights how MEC’s practices continue to reflect and reproduce the appropriation of wilderness for a narrow range of bodies.

Meaning in movement is an enduring topic in sport social sciences, but few studies have explored how sport is meaningful and for whom. The authors examined the relationships between demographic variables, meaningfulness of sport, and craftsmanship. Athletes (N = 258, 61.6% male, age ≥18) from the United Kingdom completed a demographic questionnaire, the Work and Meaning Inventory modified for sport, and the Craftsmanship Scale. Older age and individual sport significantly correlated with higher craftsmanship. Craftsmanship and religion were two independent predictors of meaningfulness, but emphasized somewhat different meaning dimensions. Meaningfulness in sport seems to be related to how athletes approach their craft, as well as their overall framework of life meaning.

The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework of continued settler colonialism. The main catalyst for this development was sport-related gentrification: a new, publicly financed ice hockey arena for the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers, and a surrounding sport and entertainment district. This two-year ethnography explores this territory, in particular the changing interactions between preexisting, less affluent city-center residents and police, private security, crisis workers, and hockey fans. It reveals how residents navigate the physical and spatial changes to a downtown that are not only structured by revanchism, but by what Rai Reece calls “carceral redlining,” or the continuation of White supremacy through regulation, surveillance, displacement, and dispossession.

In September 2019, 19,000 amateur runners participated in the Canada Army Run, a road race hosted by the Canadian Forces (CF). This ethnographic study explores the event as a site of socialization, demonstrating that the Army Run: (a) focuses on promoting the CF rather than maximizing race results, (b) promotes the CF by exceptionalizing its members, and (c) is a celebratory site of promilitary socialization and recruitment that precludes critical engagement with the CF. These findings indicate that military promotional strategies have evolved since the immediate post 9/11 era; whereas previous initiatives used sport to tie local military agendas into larger neoliberal military imperatives, the 2019 Army Run demonstrates a new tactic, depoliticizing the CF and reifying an idealized, decontextualized Canadian military.

Miami University has used Native American imagery to promote itself since its founding. In 1929, Miami teams began using the racist term Redsk*ns. In 1996–1997, they changed the name to RedHawks. Despite the strengthening relationship between the university and the tribe, the racist mascot imagery remained visible in the university community. In 2017–2018, the university returned to Native American imagery by unveiling a new “Heritage Logo” to represent a commitment to restoring the Myaamia language and culture. In this paper, the authors used tribal critical race theory to analyze how the Heritage Logo represents a point of interest convergence, where symbols of the tribe signal acceptance and recognition of the Myaamia people, while institutional racism and the possessive investment of whiteness are left ignored and unaddressed.

Existing conceptualizations of active sport tourism lack an empirical foundation in explaining the processes of embodiment through which active sport tourists engage with destination space. Adopting an autophenomenographic perspective, this paper explores embodiment in the context of a cycling tourism experience encompassing six iconic mountain passes within the French Alps synonymous with the Tour de France. Qualitative data draw attention to kinaesthetic and visceral sensations arising through multisensory feedback, along with affective responses produced as the body traverses venerated sport landscapes. This research highlights mind–body processes that shape mobile, active sport tourism experiences and provides an empirical and conceptual foundation to inform future studies of embodiment in active sport tourism.