Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions

Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions

Author: Matt Ventresca

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-18

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0429639856

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Sport’s "concussion crisis" has been characterized by controversial scientific discoveries, athlete suicides, and high-profile lawsuits involving professional sports leagues, while provoking widespread media coverage, changes to game rules, and debate about the future of many popular sports. Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussion is the first edited collection to bring together multiple sociocultural perspectives on sports concussion that interrogate the social, economic, political, and historical forces shaping the cultural impacts of these injuries. Each of the ten chapters moves beyond biomedical or neuroscientific paradigms to critically examine a specific intersection of sociocultural factors influencing public perceptions about concussion or athlete experiences of brain injury. These include analyses of media and advertising, medical treatment and diagnostic protocols, gender and masculinity, developments in equipment and scientific models, economics and labor politics, understandings of trauma and recovery, public health philosophies, and disciplinary differences in framing the ontologies of concussion. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussion offers a diverse set of analyses examining brain injuries as cultural and embodied phenomena affecting more than just athletes’ brains, but also embedded within and (re)shaping meanings, identities, and social contexts. It is valuable reading for graduate students and researchers interested in the experience and treatment of sports concussion, sports sociology, and sports technology.


The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm

The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm

Author: Stephen Wagg

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 638

ISBN-13: 3030728269

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This book looks historically at the harm that has been inflicted in the practice of sport and at some of the issues, debates and controversies that have arisen as a result. Written by experts in history, sociology, sport journalism and public health, the book considers sport and injury in relation to matters of social class; gender; ethnicity and race; sexuality; political ideology and national identity; health and wellbeing; childhood; animal rights; and popular culture. These matters are, in turn, variously related to a range of sports, including ancient, pre- and early industrial sports; American football; boxing; wrestling and other combat sports; mountaineering; horseracing; cycling; motor racing; rugby football; cricket; association football; baseball; basketball; Crossfit; ice hockey; Olympic sports; Mixed Martial Arts; and sport in an imagined dystopian future.


Plasticity in Motion

Plasticity in Motion

Author: Robert M. Foschia

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1793639590

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Plasticity in Motion: Sport, Gender, and Biopolitics argues that sport has a transformative power that, when engaged with habitually, can create bodies with the athletic ability to succeed at the incredible performances that captivate modern sports audiences. Robert M. Foschia draws heavily from the influential and extensive work of Catherine Malabou on plasticity – the ability to shape and form – and similarly argues that transformation is not always positive or infinite, with the potential for accidents, injuries, and excommunications. However, sport as a discursive space often precludes any mention of these negative transformations, asserting itself as pure potential and becoming, often to the exclusion of the feminine. What occurs if the feminine enters into this space? Foschia intentionally integrates the feminine back into hypermasculine discussions of sport, opening a new realm of possible transformations to the ways we play, watch, and think about sports. Scholars of communication, media studies, gender studies, rhetoric, and sports will find this book particularly useful.


Sports, Society, and Technology

Sports, Society, and Technology

Author: Jennifer J. Sterling

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9813291273

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Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape – from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.


Sports Science in India

Sports Science in India

Author: Martin Toms

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1040026273

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Sports Science in India: Practice and Perspective brings together key Indian academics and experts in the field of sports science (in its broadest sense) to produce summaries of the existing international research in fundamental topics of sport science with a focus on India in such a way that it can be used by students, researchers, and practitioners to help develop these areas in both an applied and a theoretical level. Sports Science in India: Practice and Perspective reflects the increase in sport science research that is being undertaken and published in India. While not intended to be sport specific, this new book contains particular cases of how sports science is applied in some sporting contexts in the Indian region—in that way, it is meant to be a seminal foundation book for those engaged with and studying sports science and is the first explicit inter-disciplinary publication examining sports science in India. This new research volume provides a crucial and timely contribution to the developing field and will bring in an essential Indian context and perspective to the areas of sports science research from the international as well as the specific context of India and will be critical reading for both researchers and students alike in the fields of Sport Science, Physical Education, Sport Technology, and Sport Coaching.


Relative Age Effects in Sport

Relative Age Effects in Sport

Author: Jess Dixon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1000069648

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Individual achievement in sport is often constrained by an athlete’s age relative to the peers with whom they participate. A common practice within sport and educational domains is to group youth based on their chronological ages to help promote equal competition, age appropriate instruction, and ensure participant safety. While well intended, such grouping practices can often advantage relatively older children, while disadvantaging those who are relatively younger within the same age cohort. These phenomena are known as Relative Age Effects (RAEs). Relative Age Effects in Sport: International Perspectives includes chapters from internationally recognized scholars who have examined RAEs from different perspectives (e.g., sport, mental health and wellbeing, youth development). This new volume assists in communicating and mobilizing knowledge and research about RAEs, focusing on developing feasible and attractive solutions that capture the attention of practitioners and policy makers from sport governing bodies and creating a resource that is accessible to professionals within the sport and academic communities. Relative Age Effects in Sport: International Perspectives is key reading for academics and researchers in the fields of athlete development, talent identification, coaching education, health and wellbeing, mental health and related disciplines, whilst also of interest to sport industry professionals such as coaches and policy makers.


The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society

The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society

Author: Lawrence A. Wenner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 1201

ISBN-13: 0197519032

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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.


Power Played

Power Played

Author: Derek Silva

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2022-10-01

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0774867825

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This innovative collection convincingly argues that modern sport can be characterized by unequal and problematic power relations that are inextricably linked to issues of violence, harm, deviance, and punishment. On the one hand, sport is a mainstay of community building, an expression of solidarity, and a means to mental and social health. On the other, there is the star player who commits sexual violence, the trans athlete whose achievements are dismissed as fraudulent, or the racist and abusive nationalism of the impassioned sports fan. From drawing connections between head trauma and athletic violence to exploring the social meanings of sport in prison, contributors to this volume reimagine sport as an important unit of analysis for critical criminologists. Messages about crime, violence, and punishment in sport mirror broader relations of power that exist off the field. Situated at the intersections of sport, sporting culture, and crime, Power Played blows the whistle on the harm, violence, and exploitation embedded within.


Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries

Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries

Author: Daniel S. Goldberg

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2024-10-22

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1421450127

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A timely look at the ethical, legal, and policy issues surrounding brain injury and collision sports. American tackle football is an industry like any other. And like many industries, it sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it—or, in this case, those who play it. In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries, Daniel S. Goldberg explores the connections among traumatic brain injury, collision sports, and the industry's continuing efforts to manufacture doubt. Focusing especially on youths and adolescents—the most vulnerable population that comprises over 99% of tackle football players in the US—Goldberg addresses the ethical and social implications of their participation in tackle football. Goldberg discusses the true scope of the danger and the costs to society and individuals of caring for injured participants. If these risks were to become widespread public knowledge, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk. As the tackle football industry has consistently worked to mask the health hazards involved in playing football, it has used a particular tool that has proved highly effective in achieving this subterfuge: the manufacture of doubt. Goldberg advocates for using public health laws as a tool for countering these efforts at obfuscation, and he outlines specific policy proposals intended to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football. The book draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Should kids play tackle football at all—and who decides if they should? Goldberg offers practical answers to these critical legal, ethical, and social questions. Chris Nowinski, former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, provides a timely and insider's perspective on these critical issues in the foreword.