International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Ahead of Print.
The term sportswashing has been discussed and analysed within academic circles, as well as the mainstream media. However, the majority of existing research has focused on one-off event-based sportswashing strategies (such as autocratic states hosting major international sports events) rather than longer term investment-based strategies (such as state actors purchasing sports clubs and teams). Furthermore, little has been written about the impact of this latter strategy on the existing fanbase of the purchased team and on their relationship with sportswashing and the discourses surrounding it. This paper addresses this lacuna through analysis of a popular Manchester City online fan forum, which illustrates the manner in which this community of dedicated City fans have legitimated the actions of the club's ownership regime, the Abu Dhabi United Group – a private equity group operated by Abu Dhabi royalty and UAE politicians. The discursive strategies of the City fans are discussed, in addition to the wider significance of these strategies on the issue of sportswashing and its coverage by the media.
Category Archives: Arts and Health
The Sexual Politics of hookup culture: A Black feminist intervention
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
Sexuality researchers wrestle with the question of how power both generates options for sexual behaviors while also constraining them, but the potential for creation and agency among minority groups remains underexamined. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 LGBTQ and racial minority college students, this article makes two core contributions. First, I document their experiences of fetishization; their concerns over safety and the potential for violence; and the invalidation of their identities in campus hookup culture. Second, I show how in response they create “community-based party cultures,” differentiated from hookup culture by four major features: (1) Differentiated access to resources, (2) varying emphases on casual sex, (3) varying expectations of anonymity, and (4) emphasized trust/safety in these spaces. Findings update research assumptions that racial minority and/or LGBTQ students passively avoid hookup culture by illuminating how they organize spaces for themselves.
Sexuality researchers wrestle with the question of how power both generates options for sexual behaviors while also constraining them, but the potential for creation and agency among minority groups remains underexamined. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 LGBTQ and racial minority college students, this article makes two core contributions. First, I document their experiences of fetishization; their concerns over safety and the potential for violence; and the invalidation of their identities in campus hookup culture. Second, I show how in response they create “community-based party cultures,” differentiated from hookup culture by four major features: (1) Differentiated access to resources, (2) varying emphases on casual sex, (3) varying expectations of anonymity, and (4) emphasized trust/safety in these spaces. Findings update research assumptions that racial minority and/or LGBTQ students passively avoid hookup culture by illuminating how they organize spaces for themselves.
‘Inclusivity for who’?: An analysis of ‘race’ and female fandom at the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Championships
International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the experiences and identities of minority ethnic women at the UEFA Women's Euros (UWE) held in England in 2022. It does so at a time when women sports fans have become more visible in the historically male-dominated environs of football fandom, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK), and when questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and gender are longstanding, contested elements of British culture and society. Through a Black feminist thought methodology allied to critical race theory principles, the study contributes an essential intersectional account of minority ethnic women's sports fandom experiences at a major international event. The findings confirm that the growth of women's football in the UK, motivated minority ethnic women to attend the UWE. However, the current visibility and inclusivity of professional women's football demonstrates a lack of diversity and cultural sensitivity, which often inhibits minority ethnic women from presenting their identities to further engage with and support the game's growth.
This article explores the experiences and identities of minority ethnic women at the UEFA Women's Euros (UWE) held in England in 2022. It does so at a time when women sports fans have become more visible in the historically male-dominated environs of football fandom, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK), and when questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and gender are longstanding, contested elements of British culture and society. Through a Black feminist thought methodology allied to critical race theory principles, the study contributes an essential intersectional account of minority ethnic women's sports fandom experiences at a major international event. The findings confirm that the growth of women's football in the UK, motivated minority ethnic women to attend the UWE. However, the current visibility and inclusivity of professional women's football demonstrates a lack of diversity and cultural sensitivity, which often inhibits minority ethnic women from presenting their identities to further engage with and support the game's growth.
‘A square peg in a round hole’. Transgender and gender diverse youth and schooling in South Africa
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
There is a continuing thread of research evidence that schools acknowledge just two self-evident genders and that trans and gender diverse (TGD) youth face significant marginalisation and exclusion. Drawing on a qualitative study of educational staff and seven TGD school-attending youth in South Africa, this paper explores two lines of inquiry – how schools as cultural and social spaces produce and resist cisnormativity and how TGD school-attending youth orientate themselves in or out of line with normative power? Shedding light on how orientation marks out boundary lines and practices of differentiation, the analysis highlights how schools produce a field of objects that ensures that schooling is orientated around the cisnormative body. The paper argues that schooling is a space where TGD youth learn their place, which is exclusion and marginalisation. The findings point to the need for urgent school reform, highlighting the need for important intervention paths to address gender diversity and schooling.
There is a continuing thread of research evidence that schools acknowledge just two self-evident genders and that trans and gender diverse (TGD) youth face significant marginalisation and exclusion. Drawing on a qualitative study of educational staff and seven TGD school-attending youth in South Africa, this paper explores two lines of inquiry – how schools as cultural and social spaces produce and resist cisnormativity and how TGD school-attending youth orientate themselves in or out of line with normative power? Shedding light on how orientation marks out boundary lines and practices of differentiation, the analysis highlights how schools produce a field of objects that ensures that schooling is orientated around the cisnormative body. The paper argues that schooling is a space where TGD youth learn their place, which is exclusion and marginalisation. The findings point to the need for urgent school reform, highlighting the need for important intervention paths to address gender diversity and schooling.
Femtech apps and quantification of the reproductive body in India: Issues and concerns
Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
This article examines datafication of the reproductive body in India through use of femtech mobile phone applications (henceforth, apps). Femtech apps quantify reproductive processes such as periods, conception, pregnancy and hormonal health and promise their users greater ‘self-awareness’ and ‘control’ through ‘self-management’. Most studies on femtech refer to users in the Global North, while there are few studies on femtech adoption in the developing countries. This article, based on qualitative and quantitative data, and informed by a feminist technoscience framework, illustrates how femtech’s promise of empowerment through datafication of reproduction is fraught with contradictions and tensions, and has exclusionary and risky consequences for Indian users. It examines the gendered technological landscape’s bearing on concrete practices of design and innovation, and shows how femtech reinforces gendered social hierarchies rather than dismantling them and liberating users. Under datafication, health standards become extremely narrowly defined, marginalising those whose reproductive health trajectories may not conform to normative standards. Femtech’s proliferation in India has also failed to recognise the structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantages that characterise healthcare access. Finally, the legal grey areas and ill-defined data privacy policies in India allow for easy commercialisation of users’ bodies and personal data possible. This further undermines the liberational rhetoric of femtech, as data privacy breaches are embodied forms of violence with consequences for users’ bodily autonomy and dignity. Femtech’s pursuit of maximising commercial gain is thus at odds with the feminist technoscience project of minimising women’s exploitation and oppression.
This article examines datafication of the reproductive body in India through use of femtech mobile phone applications (henceforth, apps). Femtech apps quantify reproductive processes such as periods, conception, pregnancy and hormonal health and promise their users greater ‘self-awareness’ and ‘control’ through ‘self-management’. Most studies on femtech refer to users in the Global North, while there are few studies on femtech adoption in the developing countries. This article, based on qualitative and quantitative data, and informed by a feminist technoscience framework, illustrates how femtech’s promise of empowerment through datafication of reproduction is fraught with contradictions and tensions, and has exclusionary and risky consequences for Indian users. It examines the gendered technological landscape’s bearing on concrete practices of design and innovation, and shows how femtech reinforces gendered social hierarchies rather than dismantling them and liberating users. Under datafication, health standards become extremely narrowly defined, marginalising those whose reproductive health trajectories may not conform to normative standards. Femtech’s proliferation in India has also failed to recognise the structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantages that characterise healthcare access. Finally, the legal grey areas and ill-defined data privacy policies in India allow for easy commercialisation of users’ bodies and personal data possible. This further undermines the liberational rhetoric of femtech, as data privacy breaches are embodied forms of violence with consequences for users’ bodily autonomy and dignity. Femtech’s pursuit of maximising commercial gain is thus at odds with the feminist technoscience project of minimising women’s exploitation and oppression.
Sustainability and the politics of the body in alternative food consumption: An embodied materialist perspective
Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Health is a key dimension of contemporary food consumption. This preoccupation is beginning to overlap with ecological concerns, as healthy diets are said to largely correspond with sustainable diets. Nevertheless, this link remains rather vague and under-researched in practice. This article adopts an ‘embodied materialist’ perspective to inquire into how the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in the everyday labour of people engaging in alternative food consumption. The interviews, carried out in Milan (Italy), suggest that focusing on health might not always be straightforwardly effective for the promotion of deep and systemic changes. The analysis finds three ways in which the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in daily life. If framed within the dominant articulation of labour and value, health is an individualistic preoccupation with limited potential for socio-ecological transformation. When food labour is guided by the very different logic of care, which emphasises relationality, fragility and the search for a shared wellbeing, more ecological practices emerge, but with some ambivalent implications especially with regards to social justice. Collective engagement in alternative food networks politicises the body more deeply, making it a concrete site of struggle against unsustainable food regimes.
Health is a key dimension of contemporary food consumption. This preoccupation is beginning to overlap with ecological concerns, as healthy diets are said to largely correspond with sustainable diets. Nevertheless, this link remains rather vague and under-researched in practice. This article adopts an ‘embodied materialist’ perspective to inquire into how the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in the everyday labour of people engaging in alternative food consumption. The interviews, carried out in Milan (Italy), suggest that focusing on health might not always be straightforwardly effective for the promotion of deep and systemic changes. The analysis finds three ways in which the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in daily life. If framed within the dominant articulation of labour and value, health is an individualistic preoccupation with limited potential for socio-ecological transformation. When food labour is guided by the very different logic of care, which emphasises relationality, fragility and the search for a shared wellbeing, more ecological practices emerge, but with some ambivalent implications especially with regards to social justice. Collective engagement in alternative food networks politicises the body more deeply, making it a concrete site of struggle against unsustainable food regimes.
Viewing place: Australian queer screen audiences born in the 1970s and 1980s
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This article investigates how viewers born in the 1970s and 1980s recall Australian film and television LGBTQ+ themes, characters and narratives they viewed while they were growing up. Aspects of place and space were centred in these accounts, from memories of watching a shared television in the domestic family setting to the physical artefact of the video tape. Participants emphasised the theme of mobility toward the city and a rural/urban distinction in the film and television they discussed, and the role of city contexts in providing better access to screen media that represented LGBTQ+ lives – for example, through access to independent cinemas. These memorial accounts were considered formative and often provided the framework by which participants perceive and navigate everyday life as members of minority communities. At the same time, these place-bound accounts of encounters with LGBTQ+ screen texts expressed a complex attachment to domestic spaces, tangible objects and narratives of mobility.
This article investigates how viewers born in the 1970s and 1980s recall Australian film and television LGBTQ+ themes, characters and narratives they viewed while they were growing up. Aspects of place and space were centred in these accounts, from memories of watching a shared television in the domestic family setting to the physical artefact of the video tape. Participants emphasised the theme of mobility toward the city and a rural/urban distinction in the film and television they discussed, and the role of city contexts in providing better access to screen media that represented LGBTQ+ lives – for example, through access to independent cinemas. These memorial accounts were considered formative and often provided the framework by which participants perceive and navigate everyday life as members of minority communities. At the same time, these place-bound accounts of encounters with LGBTQ+ screen texts expressed a complex attachment to domestic spaces, tangible objects and narratives of mobility.
Do we have the right to call ourselves an inclusive university? Untold stories of queer students at a rural university in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
Ruraqueer students constantly experience higher levels of victimization, and negative university experiences than their urban and suburban peers. Further, rural students have limited access to university resources while, queer events and workshops related to queer community, as well as university-based ongoing activities to support positive sexuality and gender identity development are scanty. This has been worsened by extant research written from an ‘outsider’ perspective lacking breadth and depth of experiences of queer students especially in rural universities from an African perspective. Anchored on a qualitative approach using purposive sampling, in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study with eight under and postgraduate students who identified as queer. Emerging themes show how rurality intersects with actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics of queer students in university spaces. Findings challenge the homogenization of university residencies; non-inclusive LGBTQ curricular; university environment that remains homophobic and how traditional, cultural and societal norms contribute to queer students sense of belonging. Implications suggest inclusive teaching and learning and ongoing awareness programmes that acknowledge diversity and enhance visibility of students with intersecting marginalized identities.
Ruraqueer students constantly experience higher levels of victimization, and negative university experiences than their urban and suburban peers. Further, rural students have limited access to university resources while, queer events and workshops related to queer community, as well as university-based ongoing activities to support positive sexuality and gender identity development are scanty. This has been worsened by extant research written from an ‘outsider’ perspective lacking breadth and depth of experiences of queer students especially in rural universities from an African perspective. Anchored on a qualitative approach using purposive sampling, in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study with eight under and postgraduate students who identified as queer. Emerging themes show how rurality intersects with actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics of queer students in university spaces. Findings challenge the homogenization of university residencies; non-inclusive LGBTQ curricular; university environment that remains homophobic and how traditional, cultural and societal norms contribute to queer students sense of belonging. Implications suggest inclusive teaching and learning and ongoing awareness programmes that acknowledge diversity and enhance visibility of students with intersecting marginalized identities.
Heteronormative silences and queer resistance in queer people’s experiences of eldercare and home
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
The meaning of home for queer people has been widely empirically explored as well as theorized. Not least has the home been important for the older generations of queer people, who lived in times where their sexualities and gender identities have been criminalized and pathologized and where there have been few public meeting places historically. However, having care needs may blur the lines between private and public and complicate notions of integrity in one’s home. This article is based on qualitative interviews and aims to explore experiences of queer people in a Swedish context who have eldercare services—either people who have home-care-services or who are living in care homes. A queer theoretical framework and reflexive thematic analysis was used. The results illustrate how there is a silence around gender and sexuality in the everyday life within eldercare. This in turn is caused by material conditions where downsizing and effectivization of the eldercare have created pressed working conditions that leave little room for small talk between staff and recipients of care. Norms on age, gender, and sexuality with notions on older people as asexual (as well as cisgender and straight) may play into this silence as well. The boundaries between the private (home) and the public (eldercare) become blurred. This in turn conditions which intimacy practices that become im/possible. Simultaneously, there is a presence of queer resistance as well as of longings for other (queer) futures.
The meaning of home for queer people has been widely empirically explored as well as theorized. Not least has the home been important for the older generations of queer people, who lived in times where their sexualities and gender identities have been criminalized and pathologized and where there have been few public meeting places historically. However, having care needs may blur the lines between private and public and complicate notions of integrity in one’s home. This article is based on qualitative interviews and aims to explore experiences of queer people in a Swedish context who have eldercare services—either people who have home-care-services or who are living in care homes. A queer theoretical framework and reflexive thematic analysis was used. The results illustrate how there is a silence around gender and sexuality in the everyday life within eldercare. This in turn is caused by material conditions where downsizing and effectivization of the eldercare have created pressed working conditions that leave little room for small talk between staff and recipients of care. Norms on age, gender, and sexuality with notions on older people as asexual (as well as cisgender and straight) may play into this silence as well. The boundaries between the private (home) and the public (eldercare) become blurred. This in turn conditions which intimacy practices that become im/possible. Simultaneously, there is a presence of queer resistance as well as of longings for other (queer) futures.
From project-based to community-based social impact assessment: New social impact assessment pathways to build community resilience and enhance disaster risk reduction and climate action
Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Social impact assessment can greatly contribute to sustainable regional and urban planning. However, social impact assessment is used primarily in the context of pre-determined projects, while social impact assessment’s role in informing regional and urban plans before projects are even conceived is under-estimated. Moreover, a narrow understanding of the social impacts of projects leads social impact assessment practitioners to consider such impacts as being the outcomes only of the technical characteristics and risks of projects and their implementation, rather than also of broader social, cultural and political-institutional processes. In this article, we reflect on these gaps in social impact assessment. We expand the conceptualization of the social impacts of projects to better consider how social impacts are also influenced by the social dimensions of risk and resilience, and by the knowledge processes and governance strategies that inform and regulate projects. We conceptualize these processes and strategies and design new conceptual models to derive the social impacts of projects. Finally, we reflect on the strategic role social impact assessment can have in enabling social learning and sustainability transformation in localities (i.e. community resilience) and across multiple governance levels (i.e. social resilience). With this article, we contribute to building a key role for social impact assessment in disaster risk reduction, climate action and sustainable development.
Social impact assessment can greatly contribute to sustainable regional and urban planning. However, social impact assessment is used primarily in the context of pre-determined projects, while social impact assessment’s role in informing regional and urban plans before projects are even conceived is under-estimated. Moreover, a narrow understanding of the social impacts of projects leads social impact assessment practitioners to consider such impacts as being the outcomes only of the technical characteristics and risks of projects and their implementation, rather than also of broader social, cultural and political-institutional processes. In this article, we reflect on these gaps in social impact assessment. We expand the conceptualization of the social impacts of projects to better consider how social impacts are also influenced by the social dimensions of risk and resilience, and by the knowledge processes and governance strategies that inform and regulate projects. We conceptualize these processes and strategies and design new conceptual models to derive the social impacts of projects. Finally, we reflect on the strategic role social impact assessment can have in enabling social learning and sustainability transformation in localities (i.e. community resilience) and across multiple governance levels (i.e. social resilience). With this article, we contribute to building a key role for social impact assessment in disaster risk reduction, climate action and sustainable development.