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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).