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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Calls to Action identified societal measures necessary for a successful reconciliation process between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada, five of which were specific to sport. Half a decade after the Calls to Action were published, the response by national sport organizations in Canada has escaped scholarly attention. Through a lens informed by settler colonial studies, the authors employed summative content analysis to examine the ways, if any, in which national sport organizations in Canada have implemented relevant Calls to Action. The results indicate a lack of response by most national sport organizations which, we argue, represents settler silence.

Several female athletes have recently challenged the long-standing assumption that pregnancy/parenthood (particularly motherhood) and participation in elite-level sport are mutually exclusive. These women’s actions have elicited change across the elite athletics industry and have sparked a need for further research to understand how elite athlete-parents perceive these shifts. We used feminist poststructuralist theory, feminist participatory action research, and semistructured interviews to explore the perspectives of 21 pregnant and parenting elite/international and world-class athletes (11 women and 10 men) on the developing degree of acceptance of parenthood in elite athletics. Through feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we identified that, despite considerable recent advancements, there is still a need for continued change in the degree to which pregnant/parenting elite athletes are accepted and supported within elite athletics.

Much of the research on Indigenous youth’s sport has focused on the barriers that they experience in accessing opportunities for participation. What remains underexplored is the idea that nonparticipation might actually reflect Indigenous youth’s deliberate refusal of Euro-Canadian sport. In making this argument, first, we connect Indigenous theories of refusal to Indigenous youth sport participation in Canada. Second, we examine the researcher’s role in reproducing colonialism in sport studies. Third, we apply examples of Indigenous refusal of sport. We conclude by discerning the central tensions of the topic and areas for future study. This paper is a call for researchers to study refusal, not only as an act by Indigenous youth, but also as a method that researchers can use in refusing to reproduce colonial representations of Indigenous youth.

This paper examines the linkages between physical education, sociology, and sociology of sport in North America. Physical education and sociology in North America have had numerous mutual ties since the beginnings of both fields. In the first section of the paper, I describe the rise of sociology and physical education in North America, emphasizing the linkages that initially existed between physical education and sociology, and then the separation that transpired between the disciplines. The second section examines the connections between social theory and physical education before the sociology of sport was formally developed. The final section details the rise of sociology of sport, with the main focus on the role of physical educators (a.k.a. sociocultural kinesiologists, sport studies scholars, human kinetics scholars) in the development of sociology of sport. This section concludes with a discussion of the linkages of social theory, critical pedagogy in physical education, and sport sociology in physical education.

© 1993 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.

In the early 1970s Spreitzer and Snyder developed the Psychosocial Functions of Sport Scale to assess people’s perceptions of the importance of sport, and they administered this instrument to a sample of Toledo, Ohio, residents. This study reassesses the reliability and construct validity of the scale and examines college students’ perceptions of the importance of sport. Factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha indicate that Spreitzer and Snyder’s scale meets the criteria of reliability and construct validity. An item analysis indicates that most subjects believe sport to be important for individuals and society. Subjects’ responses to 12 of the 15 items are strikingly similar to the response distribution reported by Spreitzer and Snyder; however, there are notable differences on three of the items, suggesting that the present sample did not view sport as an institution that develops good citizens, promotes fair play, or alleviates drug problems in society.