Ramón Spaaij

The field of sport and forced migration studies has grown considerably in recent years. Research on youth sport and refugee settlement has rapidly developed in conjunction with sport for development programming. Given the scholarly and policy attention afforded to sport as a means or context for promoting the wellbeing and settlement of children and youth with refugee backgrounds, it is timely to critically reflect on the field of research. This chapter critically examines a particular, relatively under-researched, aspect of this body of literature that addresses coaching children and youth with refugee backgrounds in sport. The literature points to a need for coaches to challenge the status quo and recognise the strengths, capabilities, knowledge, and resources of children and youth with refugee backgrounds. The chapter critically reviews the current state of academic knowledge on the relationship between sport, coaching, and refugee settlement, by identifying dominant and submerged themes in the research as well as current knowledge gaps. This is followed by outlining directions and critical challenges for future research on sport, coaching, and children and youth with refugee backgrounds.

Crowds can be subject to intrinsic and extrinsic sources of risk, and previous records have shown that, in the absence of adequate safety measures, these sources of risk can jeopardise human lives. To mitigate these risks, we propose that implementation of multiple layers of safety measures for crowds—what we label The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety—should become the norm for crowd safety practice. Such system incorporates a multitude of safety protection layers including regulations and policymaking, planning and risk assessment, operational control, community preparedness, and incident response. The underlying premise of such model is that when one (or multiple) layer(s) of safety protection fail(s), the other layer(s) can still prevent an accident. In practice, such model requires a more effective implementation of technology, which can enable provision of real-time data, improved communication and coordination, and efficient incident response. Moreover, implementation of this model necessitates more attention to the overlooked role of public education, awareness raising, and promoting crowd safety culture at broad community levels, as one of last lines of defence against catastrophic outcomes for crowds. Widespread safety culture and awareness has the potential to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills that can prevent such outcomes or mitigate their impacts, when all other (exogenous) layers of protection (such as planning and operational control) fail. This requires safety campaigns and development of widespread educational programs. We conclude that, there is no panacea solution to the crowd safety problem, but a holistic multi-layered safety system that utilises active participation of all potential stakeholders can significantly reduce the likelihood of disastrous accidents. At a global level, we need to target a Vision Zero of Crowd Safety, i.e., set a global initiative of bringing deaths and severe injuries in crowded spaces to zero by a set year.

Extending previous work suggesting that group-based extremist violence is morally-motivated, we investigated whether lone-actor terrorists are similarly morally-driven, and if so, whether their moral motivations may predict the severity of their attacks. Examining a database containing details of n = 121 lone-actor terrorist attacks, we applied a coding scheme derived from moral foundations theory to extract the main moral motivation driving each violent lone-actor, if any. Using the results of the content analysis, we then examined whether actors’ moral motivations predicted the injuries and fatalities associated with their attacks. Findings suggested: (1) ingroup loyalty-motivated attacks were 2.42 times deadlier and care-motivated acts were 10.73 times more injurious compared to acts driven by other motivations, (2) lone-actors were most likely to be driven by binding motivations overall, and (3) lone-actors’ moral motivations largely align with the moral motivation of extremist groups for which they have an affinity. We discuss the utility of moral foundations theory for describing, explaining, and predicting the moral motivations of violent actors.

A challenge in safeguarding children from interpersonal violence (IV) in sport is the reliance on self-disclosures and a limited understanding of the frequency, barriers to and process of disclosures of IV. Through a mixed-methods design, combining survey and interviews, we explored the frequencies of childhood disclosures of experiences of IV in Australian community sport as well as who children disclosed to and how the interaction unfolded. Those who experienced peer violence disclosed at the highest frequency (35%), followed by coach (27%) or parent (13%) perpetrated IV. A parent/carer was most often the adult that the child disclosed to. Interviews highlighted how the normalisation of violence influenced all aspects of the disclosure and elements of stress buffering (normalising or rationalising) particularly underpinned the disclosure interaction. Policies and practices should explicitly identify all forms of IV in sport as prohibited conduct; education and intervention initiatives should target parents as first responders to disclosures.

Beliefs in hostile conspiracies against ‘Western civilisation’ or ‘white people’ play a key role in tying divergent far-right tropes together under an internally coherent meta-narrative. Claims of having discovered this conspiratorial truth offer personal pride, create a sense of righteousness and urgency to stand up against these alleged secretive, malevolent forces, and help build a parallel counter-hegemonic community with its own distinct epistemology. Using qualitative interviews and a focus group, this study examines how actors engaged in ‘ordinary’ dissent in Australia developed an antagonistic fringe belief system, and the extent to which this alternative epistemology constitutes a manifestation of ‘anti-publics’ (Davis, 2021). The study found how participants’ ideological mindset has grown from rather benign manifestations of dissent into a hostile, counter-hegemonic, conspiratorial meta-narrative through processes of ‘doing their own research’, sharing their learnings with significant others, and incorporating each other’s ideological convictions. Their ideological radicalisation was characterised by personal feelings of pride and epistemic superiority, which created a sense of meaning, urgency, and purpose, as well as social recognition within their group. These psychological and social processes drew them further into a far-right ‘anti-public’ milieu and away from democratic expressions of dissent. The findings shed new light on how the complex and mutually reinforcing interplay between ideological and socio-psychological factors cements an alternative, oppositional epistemology. The study offers close-up insights into what drives radicalisation processes, creating or reinforcing a parallel ‘anti-public’ in hostile opposition to democratic processes and norms.

This work builds upon critical youth studies’ concern with capacity building in engaging young people as active agents for social change. This article analyses critical capacity building processes among young women engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR) that sought to co-design a community sport programme in Melbourne, Australia. Participants included the first author, four young women (second to the fifth author), and a critical friend (sixth author). The experience of engaging young women in YPAR foregrounded significant capacity building such as: (a) learning to genuinely listen to young people in order to plan for change; (b) finding creative and flexible ways to build relationships; (c) learning to negotiate the messiness and uncertainty in the research process; and (d) improving problem-solving skills in order to listen and respond to young people in their community. This paper concludes by articulating how YPAR can potentialise the development of critical capacity building in youth studies, nurturing skills and knowledge linked with social justice, activism, and democracy, instead of instrumentalist and technocratic capacity-building models that focus on training and predefined practical skills.

Sport participation can offer migrants a modality to connect with dominant cultural norms and potentially foster interculturalism, yet it is often fraught with exclusion. Little is known about how informal sports that migrants have introduced into countries of resettlement affect their (non)belonging. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork over a 14-month period, this article examines how Hazara men’s involvement in the ethno-specific informal sport of sangarag influences their post-migration experiences of (non)belonging in Australia. The findings indicate that Hazara men’s construction of sangarag as a space and resource for belonging needs to be understood as a response to the challenging circumstances they experience in their settlement journeys. The overt and subtle politics of belonging that govern sangarag reinforce intra-group differentiations, most notably in relation to gender and ability. Further tensions stem from sangarag’s marginal status outside of the Australian sports system, leaving participants to feel unsupported and misrecognised by local institutions. Implications for policy include the need to recognise and support the value that informal sports can have for migrants’ ability to (re)claim a sense of belonging and wellbeing.

A number of publications have recently suggested or claimed that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) do or may increase an individual’s risk of or vulnerability for terrorism engagement. In this paper, we aim to ascertain the extent and nature of this purported relationship between ASD and terrorism engagement as reported in peer-reviewed literature. We analyse the relevant literature by considering research designs and the importance of comparison groups in analytic studies for studying why outcomes occur. This review finds that the evidential and theoretical basis in research for the identified suggestions and claims is lacking. Existing research cannot definitively conclude, nor does it suggest, that individuals with ASD are any more vulnerable to, or any more at risk of, terrorism engagement than other individuals. The findings of this literature review pose questions that arise across the research-practice debate. We discuss and attempt to broaden the research-practice debate in relation to the ongoing ASD-terrorism debate by drawing upon critique from the field of science studies.

There are systemic and longstanding inequalities in sport participation for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) migrants. Drawing on theoretical foundations of critical pedagogy and social justice education, as well as a public sociology perspective, this paper examines the development of an action research (AR) project to support the co-creation of inclusive climates in sports clubs in CALD communities in Melbourne, Australia. We use artefacts from collaborative sessions, interviews, and surveys to analyse the AR’s impact on participating community sport leaders’ awareness and practice. The findings indicate how the collaborative process of assessing clubs’ diversity and inclusion climates affected participants’ awareness of inequities and exclusionary practices, and how the co-creation of strategies for change brought together diverse perspectives. We reflect on the implications and limitations of the AR for research practice aimed at promoting equitable social inclusion for CALD migrants in community sport.

Elite and semielite athletes commonly experience mental health concerns and disorders. Compared with men athletes, women athletes are at greater risk of a range of psychological stressors that contribute to health concerns and mental health disorders, which can impact their career satisfaction and longevity. In order to address and improve the mental health of women athletes, it is necessary to simultaneously tackle the gender specific psychosocial stressors that contribute to mental health outcomes. This narrative review examines the gender-specific stressors that affect mental health and well-being in women athletes, some of which are modifiable. Psychosocial stressors identified include exposure to violence, be it psychological, physical or sexual in nature, which can result in a myriad of acute and long-lasting symptoms; and inequities as reflected in pay disparities, under-representation in the media, fewer opportunities in leadership positions and implications associated with family planning and motherhood. Strategies to promote mental health in women athletes should be considered, and where possible, should proactively address gender-specific stressors likely to influence mental health in order to maximise positive outcomes in women athletes.

This chapter explores the association between sport and social mobility. Drawing on a review of literature and primary research on elite women’s road cycling, it is shown that opportunities for social mobility exist in sport, with key mechanisms being earnings, occupational status, educational attainment, and social prestige. However, it is evident from the literature and the primary data that these opportunities and pathways are not distributed evenly. There is considerable evidence to support the argument that, on the whole, sport is not the social equalizer it is considered to be, regardless of what high-profile rags-to-riches stories may suggest. Social factors such as gender, race-ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (and the intersections between them) moderate opportunities for social mobility in and through sport. Those from privileged backgrounds, and especially white middle-class males, are more likely to benefit from social mobility opportunities and pathways in sport than persons from underserved communities. This social stratification pattern is influenced by conditions and circumstances of early life, which shape disparities in access to sport participation opportunities from an early age. The case study of women’s road cycling illustrates how these dynamics will vary across sports labor markets of different size, depending on both the economic opportunities within a sport and the resources required to enter the sport and to maintain a playing career.

Sport has come to have an increasingly large impact on daily life and commerce across the globe. From mega-events, such as the World Cup or Super Bowl, to the early socialization of children into sport, the study of sport and society has developed as a distinctly wide-ranging scholarly enterprise, centered in sociology, sport studies, and cultural, media, and gender studies.

In The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society, Lawrence Wenner brings together contributions from the world’s leading scholars on sport and society to create the premier comprehensive and interdisciplinary reference for scholars and students looking to understand key areas of inquiry about the role and impacts of sport in contemporary culture. The Handbook offers penetrating analyses of the key ways that today’s outsized sport is integrated into the lives of both athletes and fans and increasingly shapes the social fabric and cultural logics across the world. Featuring 85 leading international scholars, the volume is organized into six sections: society and values, enterprise and capital, participation and cultures, lifespan and careers, inclusion and exclusion, and spectator engagement and media. To aid comprehension and comparison, each chapter opens with a brief introduction to the area of research and features a common organizational scheme with three main sections of key issues, approaches, and debates to guide scholars and students to what is currently most important in the study of each area.

Written at an accessible level and offering rich resources to further study each topic, this handbook is an essential resource for scholars and students as well as general readers who wish to understand the growing social, cultural, political, and economic influences of sport in society and our everyday lives.

Far and away the most popular sport in the world, football has a special place in Middle Eastern societies, and for Middle Eastern states. With Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this region has been cast into the global footballing spotlight, raising issues of geopolitical competition, consumer culture and social justice. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the complex questions raised by the phenomenon of football as a significant cultural force in the Middle East, as well as its linkages to broader political and socioeconomic processes. The establishment of football as a national sport offers significant insight into the region’s historical experiences with colonialism and struggles for independence, as well as the sport’s vital role in local and regional politics today-whether at the forefront of popular mobilizations, or as an instrument of authoritarian control. Football has also served as an arena of contestation in the formation of national identity, the struggle for gender equality, and the development of the media landscape. The twelve contributions to this volume draw on extensive engagement with the existing body of literature, and introduce original research questions that promise to open new directions for the study of football in the Middle East.

Oxford University Press

This paper examines online expressions of rivalry and hate speech in relation to antisemitic discourses in Dutch professional men’s football (soccer), with specific attention devoted to how this has developed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyses football-related antisemitic discourses in the Dutch-speaking Twittersphere between 2018 and 2021. Assuming that during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic fan activity has moved increasingly toward the online domain, we specifically examine whether and how the past pandemic years have influenced football-related antisemitic discourses on Twitter. Tweets were scraped using the Twitter application programming interface and 4CAT (a capture and analysis Toolkit), producing a dataset of 7,917 unique posts. The authors performed thematic analysis of the Tweets and a selection of the Tweets was analyzed in depth using narrative digital discourse analysis. The findings show how these Tweets, while seemingly targeted exclusively at football opponents, contribute to wider exclusionary discourse in football and society that may have become more aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the first few months of the pandemic, professional sport around the globe stopped, as competitions and leagues were cancelled, postponed, or went into hiatus while sport administrators scrambled to work out ways to reboot their product in a COVID-19 world. Sport media outlets were faced with the task of reporting on sport and filling the void for fans in the absence of any live content. This article is concerned with the content, both in quantity and quality that fans of women’s sport could consume in those first months. In the context of the current “boom” in women’s professional sports, we draw on the analysis of two online sport media sites to consider the narratives of female athletes that fans had access to. The findings suggest that during the beginning of the pandemic sport stories about women were largely erased and replaced by those appealing to a very different fan market.

Childhood sport participation is associated with physical, social, and mental health benefits, which are more likely to be realized if the sport environment is safe. However, our understanding of children’s experience of psychological, physical, and sexual violence in community sport in Australia is limited. The aims of this study were to provide preliminary evidence on the extent of experiences of violence during childhood participation in Australian community sport and to identify common perpetrators of and risk factors for violence. The Violence Towards Athletes Questionnaire (VTAQ) was administered online to a convenience sample of Australian adults (>18 years), retrospectively reporting experiences of violence during childhood community sport. Frequencies of experience of violence were calculated and Chi-square tests were conducted to determine differences between genders. In total, there were 886 respondents included in the analysis. Most survey respondents were women (63%) and about a third were men (35%). About 82% of respondents experienced violence in sport as a child. Psychological violence was most prevalent (76%), followed by physical (66%) and sexual (38%) violence. Peers perpetrated the highest rates of psychological violence (69%), and the rates of physical and psychological violence by coaches (both >50%) were also high. Age, sexual orientation, disability, and hours of weekly sport participation as a child were all associated with childhood experience of violence in sport. The rates of interpersonal violence against children in sport were high. This novel data on perpetrators of the violence and the risk factors for experiencing violence provides further context to inform safeguarding strategies in sport. A national prevalence study is recommended to advance our understanding of the childhood experiences of violence in Australian sport.

This progressive and broad-ranging handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complex intersections between politics, gender, sport and physical activity, shining new light on the significance of gender, sport and physical activity in wider society.  

Featuring contributions from leading and emerging researchers from around the world, the book makes the case that gender studies and critical thinking around gender are of particular importance in an era of increasingly intolerant populist politics. It examines important long-term as well as emerging themes, such as recent generational shifts in attitudes to gender identity in sport and the socio-cultural expectations on men and women that have traditionally influenced and often disrupted their engagement with sport and physical activity, and explores a wide range of current issues in contemporary sport, from debates around the contested gender binary and sex verification, to the role of the media and social media, and the significance of gender in sport leadership, policy and decision-making. 

This book is an authoritative survey of the current state of play in research connecting gender, sport, physical activity and politics, and is an important contribution to both sport studies and gender studies. It is fascinating reading for any student, researcher, policy-maker or professional with an interest in sport, physical activity, social studies, public health or political science.

The drop off in physical activity (PA) for children has led to an increased focus on their PA engagement, due to the poor health outcomes often linked to this decline. Subsequently, stakeholders, across a variety of fields, have problematised and intervened in activity settings to address this decline. Many of these studies acknowledge high levels of activity in the primary years and tend to prioritise their efforts on the adolescent years. An important limitation in these studies is that they greatly overlook how a decline might also be related to children’s physical engagement in early childhood. To gain more insight on the role that early PA engagement may play in long-term PA participation, this paper examines early physical engagement through a focus on year one/ two students across three PA spaces – the home, the physical education (PE) class and the playground. Data was collected through a range of ethnographic and child-centred methods and examined using a Bourdieusian lens. This analysis shows that engagement in PA starts as a confluence between the physically active habitus, sport-focused PE and the sportised playground, which produces different patterns of engagement. This paper offers an in-depth examination of this process across the three spaces and identifies how these outcomes become habitualised over the course of primary school, which may play a role in affecting long-term participation. The paper concludes with a call for a more democratised approach to early primary PE, along with accompanying changes to the playground.

Critical scholarship in sport for development (SfD) advocates transformative research to disrupt the historical colonising view of sport as a vehicle to acculturate people into the values and norms of dominant Western culture. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth throughout the research process and consequently has the potential to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production in SfD. In reality, however, authentic engagement of co-researchers in the research process is often largely confined to data collection. This article draws on the decolonising lens as a theoretical framework to examine tensions, possibilities, and power relations that researchers and co-researchers encounter when co-designing and implementing YPAR in SfD. The project comprised a sixteen-week YPAR in a community-based football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection comprised weekly collaborative meetings, observations collected as field notes, artefacts produced by participants, interviews, and reflective meetings. Findings centred on three themes: (a) finding sensitive ways to navigate the tensions of building trust and rapport; (b) negotiating the struggle between the co-researchers and the coaches about the use of space within the sport context; and (c) the challenges of relinquishing power in research and knowledge production, as reflected in our collective struggle to communicate to participants the value of YPAR for themselves and their communities. The findings challenge a romantic view that YPAR is guaranteed to be an empowering experience for young people; instead, they foreground the complexities and messiness of the process of sharing power with co-researchers in SfD. We conclude by advocating for critical, reflexive YPAR with explicit social transformation objectives to work toward the co-production of knowledge with young people.

Participation in Australian club-based sport has either plateaued or declined across a broad array of sports over the last 20 years. In contrast, participation in informal forms of sport has increased across the time. Despite the increasing popularity of informal sport, this form of participation continues to lack recognition as a legitimate and valuable avenue for population-wide sport participation. This article focuses on examining the spatial exclusion of informal sport within community sport systems. Theoretically informed by concepts of spatial justice and Lefebvre’s theories of spatial production this article utilises the perspective of multiple stakeholders and a multi-level policy analysis to demonstrate the current spatial injustice that manifests within policy, planning, and use of public spaces and the significant constraints consequently arising for communities wishing to participate in informal sport. We argue that the marginalisation of informal sport is at odds with Australian policy agendas that emphasise an urgent need to increase population levels of physical activity. The article concludes that action to counter spatial injustice within community sport is essential to capitalise on the opportunities that informal participation presents to address key health and social policy priorities.

It is widely believed that lone actors present particular challenges to authorities due to the hidden and often “doing-yourself-in” nature of their operations. In reality, the very nature of their (relative) loneness means that they face significant obstacles in turning extremist belief and intent into violent action. Comprehensive preparation and planning is a key element in launching a successful terrorist attack. However, lone actors often face a disconnect between intention and capability, and this is particularly true in their procurement of weapons and training in their usage. This disconnect tends to inform the lone actors’ choice of targets and weapons. However, we also know that lone actors can be creative and learn to hone their skills at operationalizing violence.

This chapter critically examines what is currently known about the operationalization of lone-actor terrorism, with a focus on the means and methos used to translate extremist beliefs into violent action. We first discuss the current state of scientific knowledge on the subject. This is followed by an examination of the international context based on an analysis of the Lone Actor Terrorism Micro-Sociological Database compiled by the first author. We then examine trends that are specific to the US context through an analysis of the American Lone Wolf Terrorism Database. We interpret these findings in relation to current US gun legislation. In the final section, we draw together the main findings and propose some directions for future research, policy, and practice.

Lone-actor terrorism has unfortunately been on the rise in recent decades, causing major adverse societal effects in the United States and abroad. While lone-actor terrorists can be driven by a range of identifiable factors such as extremist views or availability of weapons, the process of becoming and identifying these individuals is deeply complicated.

Lone-Actor Terrorism: An Integrated Framework outlines the societal causes and impacts of lone-actor terrorism from a multi-disciplinary, international perspective. Drawing together seasoned insights across clinical and forensic mental health, sociology, criminology, law, military and intelligence, and security, this volume explores patterns common to lone-actor terrorists across four major sections: historical and case examples, clinical aspects, non-clinical professional and allied perspectives, and assessment and potential approaches to reducing the risk of lone-actor terrorism. Contributors describe both individual clinical factors affecting lone-actors, including developmental aspects, mental health variables, psychoactive drugs, psychometrics and linguists, along with broader social factors such as propaganda and rhetoric, social media, and geographical considerations. This volume concludes with a review of the available threat and risk assessment tools applicable to lone-actor terrorism cases and provides guidance for professionals seeking to reduce risk.

While there is no uniform approach to the concept of lone-actor terrorism, this edited volume provides a diverse yet authoritative overview for those interested in better understanding the threats of lone-actor terrorism and its professional response.

The field of physical education (PE), sport, and forced migration studies has grown considerably in recent years. Although we have seen an increase in publications in the field, no reviews of pedagogies regarding people with refugee backgrounds in PE and sport have been published to date. The purpose of this review is to critically examine pedagogies implemented with young people with refugee backgrounds in PE and sport. Using Freirean critical pedagogy as an analytical lens, we identified two themes: (a) the need to overcome cultural deficit perspectives by engaging in dialogue with the young people and (b) the need to move from assimilationist to co-designed ways of working with the young people in PE and sport. We outline directions and critical challenges for future research on the relationship between young people with refugee backgrounds and pedagogies implemented in PE and sport.