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“People Still Believe a Bicycle Is for a Poor Person”: Features of “Bicycles for Development” Organizations in Uganda and Perspectives of Practitioners

Madison Ardizzi, Brian Wilson, Lyndsay Hayhurst, and Janet Otte

Bicycles have been hailed by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations for use in social and economic development. However, there is a lacuna of research exploring the value of bicycles for development (BFD) outside of Europe and America. Specifically, there is a lack of research on the structure and perspectives of BFD organizations. This study draws on 19 semistructured interviews with BFD organizations in various regions of Uganda. We found that (a) BFD organizations exist along a spectrum from community-based to international, (b) the meanings ascribed to the bicycle are unstable and context dependent, and (c) that there were a range of ways that bicycles were seen to lead to positive outcomes—although barriers to attaining these outcomes were identified too. The authors conclude by suggesting that while bicycles are considered useful for a range of development purposes, perspectives on their usefulness vary—as inequalities commonly associated with sport for development are evident in the BFD movement too.

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Rugby, Nationalism, and Deaf Athlete Counterhegemony: Insights From the Case of Fiji

Yoko Kanemasu

This article explores the nexus between power, sport, and disability with a focus on Deaf rugby in Fiji. Based on semistructured interviews with players, officials, and stakeholders, this article outlines their pursuit of rugby and participation in a recent international tournament under Fiji’s specific postcolonial social conditions. It examines what this experience means to the players and officials, and the sociopolitical significance it holds in the multiple relations of power that the game is embedded in. This article shows Deaf rugby as a significant counterhegemonic force that reconfigures Fiji’s rugby discourse by appropriating its key constitutive element: anti-imperialist modern nationalism. This article further explores Deaf rugby’s implication in prevailing gender/ethnoracial/corporeal politics with a view to offering nuanced insights into the question of resistance in/through disability sport in a Global South context.

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Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport

Doo Jae Park, Na Ri Shin, Synthia Sydnor, and Caitlin Clarke

This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The authors argue that music and sport can be understood as a semiological system that shapes non-Whites’ ideological belief system. In addition, this essay engages with a discussion of cultural classification that often racializes skaters of color as the aforementioned are informed by Orientalism.

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One Step Forward, Two Tweets Back: Exploring Cultural Backlash and Hockey Masculinity on Twitter

Daniel Sailofsky and Madeleine Orr

Between 2000 and 2018, the number of fights in professional hockey decreased by more than half, reflecting rule changes intended to preserve player health. A 2019 playoff fight ignited debate on social media over the place of fighting in hockey. This research involved a content analysis of an incendiary tweet and the 920 replies it solicited. Content analysis confirmed that cultural backlash exists in sport and provided insight into manifestations of backlash. Comments exhibiting backlash varied by subject (i.e., what or who is being discussed in the tweet) and attitude (i.e., positive approval for fighting and negative attitude toward change), with many defending hockey masculinity. Connections are drawn to manifestations of backlash in the political realm, the extant hockey masculinity literature, and implications for sociological theory and the sport of hockey are discussed.

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“The Best Recovery You Could Possibly Get”: Sleep, Rest, and the National Basketball Association

Sarah Barnes

This article contextualizes recent concerns about rest in the National Basketball Association by considering the concurrent rise of a promotional sleep culture. This work builds upon Grant Farred’s analysis of the event of the Black athletic body at rest. Drawing on research from the cultural studies of sport and the critical sleep literature, the author complicates the idea that rest, broadly conceived of as sleep, is a straightforward route to resistance or refusal. Instead of dislodging underlying racial logics or capitalist expectations, the promotion of sleep among National Basketball Association players makes their recovery habits subject to greater surveillance and commodification. Such developments have obvious consequences for athletes and sport systems. What is less apparent is how these social forces also shape collective understandings of sleep difficulties and how to solve them.

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Rap Sessions From the Field: Intersectional Conversations With Jemele Hill, Bun B, Fat Joe, and IDK

C. Keith Harrison and Reggie Saunders

To end this special issue, Dr. C. Keith Harrison and Reggie Saunders connected with individuals that exist at the intersection of hip-hop culture and sport. This series of interviews begins with Jemele Hill, an American sports journalist and activist. A graduate from Michigan State University, Jemele also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida from 2012 to 2014 teaching undergraduate sport business management students practical lessons about sport media. Reggie has been an adjunct faculty member at University of Central Florida since 2015, co-teaching innovation and entrepreneurship in sport/entertainment with Harrison. Reggie follows with an interview with Bun B, one half of the Texas rap duo, UGK and currently an adjunct professor at Rice University teaching a course on religion and hip-hop. New York rapper and entrepreneur, Fat Joe weighs in briefly on the topic, and Reggie closes out by interviewing rapper and Washington DC native, IDK. IDK is known for his hit song 24, and has a notable fan in Kevin Durant, National Basketball Association superstar and fellow Washington, DC native.

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Too Many Chairs: Spatiality and Disability in Integrated Sporting Spaces

Nancy Quinn, Laura Misener, and P. David Howe

The research examined spatiality of The Village during the Commonwealth Games XXI. Central to the research is the perspective of the parasport athlete. By foregrounding this perspective, new understandings of the geography of sporting spaces become possible. The integrated nature of the Games establishes The Village as a significant space to consider spatiality and disability. Ethnographic methodology was utilized. The first author, a veteran of many Paralympic Games, brought an “insider” perspective. Thematic analysis was conducted, and three themes, such as language informs space, hypervisibility of the body, and indoor versus outdoor spaces are presented as an ethnographic vignette. Inaccessible construction and hypervisibility of the body in certain spaces impacted athlete experience. The Village Pub and pools were examples of inhospitable spaces for athletes. The language of Games personnel significantly affected athlete participation in Village life.

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Performance Factors and Strategies Favored by French Olympic Athletes

Helene Joncheray, Fabrice Burlot, Nicolas Besombes, Sébastien Dalgalarrondo, and Mathilde Desenfant

This article presents the performance factors identified by Olympic athletes and analyzes how they were prioritized and implemented during the 2012–2016 Olympiad. To address this issue, 28 semistructured interviews were conducted with French athletes who participated in the Olympic Games in 2016. The analysis shows that to achieve performance, only two factors were implemented by all the athletes: training and physical preparation. The other factors, namely, mental preparation, nutrition, and recovery care, were not implemented by all athletes. In addition, two main types of configurations have been identified: a minority of athletes (n = 4) for whom the choice of performance factors and their implementation are controlled by the coach and a majority (n = 24) who adopts secondary adjustments by relying on a parallel network.

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The Talent Paradox: Disenchantment, Disengagement, and Damage Through Sport

William V. Massey and Meredith A. Whitley

Previous researchers have demonstrated that sport participation can be a place of purpose, a place of celebrated deviance, and/or a value-neutral endeavor for children who have experienced developmental trauma. While previous research has focused primarily on sport as a positive influence, the purpose of this paper is to examine where disillusionment, disengagement, and damage occur through participation in sport. This study was guided by a constructionist epistemology, with the researchers aiming to understand how sport participation interacted with various system-level influences. Interviews were conducted with 41 former athletes, significant others, and community members. The results of this study explore how a sport system can contribute to disillusionment in sport, disengagement from sport, and damage done through sport.

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Sport and Physical Activity Practices Examined Through Parents’ Discourse About Children’s Rugby League

Megan Apse, Roslyn Kerr, and Kevin Moore

This study examined the ways in which discourses operate when parents talk about their children’s participation in rugby league in New Zealand. The primary interest was in the recruitment and reinforcement of sport and physical activity discourses. The paper uses a critical discursive psychological approach to identify regularities in the ways a sample of parents spoke about their children’s sport and links these patterned ways of speaking to the dominant discourses that they both comprise and are composed of. The navigation of discourses, chiefly those around masculinity, revealed that children’s sport and physical activity are regarded in gendered ways. The parents’ engagement with dominant discourses enabled them to position themselves as both knowledgeable of social norms and acting in the best interest of their child(ren).