The challenges of intersectionality: Researching difference in physical education

Researching the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality and disability raises many issues for educational research. Indeed, Maynard (2002, 33) has recently argued that ‘difference is one of the most significant, yet unresolved, issues for feminist and social thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century’. This paper reviews some of the key imperatives of working with ‘intersectional theory’ and explores the extent to these debates are informing research around difference in education and Physical Education (PE). The first part of the paper highlights some key issues in theorising and researching intersectionality before moving on to consider how difference has been addressed within PE. The paper then considers three ongoing challenges of intersectionality – bodies and embodiment, politics and practice and empirical research. The paper argues for a continued focus on the specific context of PE within education for its contribution to these questions

Representing valued bodies in PE: a visual inquiry with British Asian girls

Background: Status or value in sport and physical education (PE) contexts is often associated with performances of highly proficient sporting bodies, which produce hierarchies of privileged and marginalised gendered and racialised positions. This may be communicated through text and images shared within school, physical cultures and media that young people consume. Understanding how students make sense of constructions of valued bodies in PE, and how this affects their sense of self, can assist in creating spaces for young people to experience alternative narratives. Focus: The paper’s aims are to explore varying ways British Asian girls visualise and make sense of themselves as active or sporting bodies, and what this means for their (dis)engagement in physical activity. Theoretical framework: This study draws on a feminist poststructuralist approach concerning the ways in which young people create multiple subject positions through negotiating or rejecting verbal and visual narratives about physical activity and girlhood. Methods: The data draws from a one-year collaborative visual ethnography conducted with 25 students aged 13–14 in a predominantly British Asian urban secondary school in the UK. In this research, student-participants were included in the data production through being asked to create photographs over a two-week period that represented their views of valued bodies in physical activity contexts in and out of school. Focus group interviews used participant-driven photo elicitation techniques to talk through the images. Findings: In this paper, two British Asian girls’ photos enabled them to talk about, analyse, and reflect on valued or sporting bodies that they saw in visual media. The girls illustrated their performances of constrained or empowered physicalities, within a physical culture that values, among girls, racialised performances of active but feminised bodies. Many girls placed their physical activity significantly in school, and saw sporting bodies as male and elite. Where students do not associate people like themselves as sporting bodies, there may be implications for their continued involvement in physical activity. At the same time, girls were physically activity outside of school despite not seeing themselves as sporty. Reflecting on the invisibility of minority ethnic women in sports media, this research suggests that greater representation may enable young minority women to see themselves and people like them as valued bodies in sport and physical activity

Asymmetric triplex metallohelices with high and selective activity against cancer cells

Small cationic amphiphilic α-helical peptides are emerging as agents for the treatment of cancer and infection, but they are costly and display unfavourable pharmacokinetics. Helical coordination complexes may offer a three-dimensional scaffold for the synthesis of mimetic architectures. However, the high symmetry and modest functionality of current systems offer little scope to tailor the structure to interact with specific biomolecular targets, or to create libraries for phenotypic screens. Here, we report the highly stereoselective asymmetric self-assembly of very stable, functionalized metallohelices. Their anti-parallel head-to-head-to-tail ‘triplex’ strand arrangement creates an amphipathic functional topology akin to that of the active sub-units of, for example, host-defence peptides and ​p53. The metallohelices display high, structure-dependent toxicity to the human colon carcinoma cell-line HCT116 ​p53++, causing dramatic changes in the cell cycle without DNA damage. They have lower toxicity to human breast adenocarcinoma cells (MDA-MB-468) and, most remarkably, they show no significant toxicity to the bacteria methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. At a glanc

Simultaneous assessment of regional distributions of atrophy across the neuraxis in MS patients

BACKGROUND: The ability to assess brain and cord atrophy simultaneously would improve the efficiency of MRI to track disease evolution. OBJECTIVE: To test a promising tool to simultaneously map the regional distribution of atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients across the brain and cord. METHODS: Voxel-based morphometry combined with a statistical parametric mapping probabilistic brain-spinal cord (SPM-BSC) template was applied to standard T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans covering the brain and cervical cord from 37 MS patients and 20 healthy controls (HC). We also measured the cord area at C2-C3 with a semi-automatic segmentation method using (i) the same T1-weighted acquisitions used for the new voxel-based analysis and (ii) dedicated spinal cord phase sensitive inversion recovery (PSIR) acquisitions. Cervical cord findings derived from the three approaches were compared to each other and the goodness to fit to clinical scores was assessed by regression analyses. RESULTS: The SPM-BSC approach revealed a severity-dependent pattern of atrophy across the cervical cord and thalamus in MS patients when compared to HCs. The magnitude of cord atrophy was confirmed by the semi-automatic extraction approach at C2-C3 using both standard brain T1-weighted and advanced cord dedicated acquisitions. Associations between atrophy of cord and thalamus with disability and cognition were demonstrated. CONCLUSION: Atrophy in the brain and cervical cord of MS patients can be identified simultaneously and rapidly at the voxel-level. The SPM-BSC approach yields similar results as available standard processing tools with the added advantage of performing the analysis simultaneously and faster

"Is social inclusion through PE, sport and PA still a rhetoric?" evaluating the relationship between physical education, sport and social inclusion

This Special Issue is part of Educational Review’s Hall of Fame, comprising the journal’s most read and highly cited papers. As part of this I will be critiquing a milestone paper within the field(s) of Sport, PE and (I will extend to) PA by Professor Richard Bailey. The paper has been amongst the most-cited in the journal and I have personally cited the paper numerous times in my own work thus far. Upon its original publication (nearly 13 years ago), the article (managed to provide a very useful distinction between PE and sport (and PA), which is important given the constant slippage between the terms in many articles since. In this response article, I will try to provide a brief summary of the paper from Bailey, but at the same time examine closely the notion of social inclusion through sport and PE by summarising work that has subsequently been conducted. I will conclude by summarising that some 13 years later spurious claims about effective inclusive practices through sport abound, and we still lack clear evidence to support the rhetoric about the ways in which sport and PE can contribute to social inclusion

Synthesis of Highly Functionalized Oligobenzamide Proteomimetic Foldamers by Late Stage Introduction of Sensitive Groups

α-Helix proteomimetics represent an emerging class of ligands that can be used to inhibit an array of helix mediated protein-protein interactions. Within this class of inhibitor, aromatic oligobenzamide foldamers have been widely and succssefuly used. This manuscript describes alternative syntheses of these compounds that can be used to access mimetics that are challenging to synthesize using previously described methodologies, permiting access to compounds functionalized with multiple sensitive side chains and accelerated library assembly through late stage derivatisation

Towards “Bionic” Proteins: Replacement of Continuous Sequences from HIF-1α with Proteomimetics to Create Functional p300 Binding HIF-1α Mimics

Using the HIF-1α transcription factor as a model, this manuscript illustrates how an extended sequence of α-amino acids in a polypeptide can be replaced with a non-natural topographical mimic of an α-helix comprised from an aromatic oligoamide. The resultant hybrid is capable of reproducing the molecular recognition profile of the p300 binding sequence of HIF-1α from which it is derived

The meaning of social context: experiences of and educational outcome of participation in two different sport contexts

The original publication is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13573320701600571Based on a general belief in society, about the good outcome of sport, this article critically examines the meaning ? that is both the personal experience of participation and the potential educational outcome ? which is derived from participation in two sport contexts under the umbrella of the Sports City Program (SCP) in Norway. With a theoretical framework based on the field theory of Bourdieu, and a qualitative methodological approach, the article indicates that there are differences within the SCP, with one pole of the SCP close to conventional sport and the other pole more distinctly different from conventional sport. In short, there are different meanings derived from pursuing different contexts of the subfield of the SCP. Different sport contexts attract different adolescents, produce different experiences and facilitate different educational opportunities. Out of the two SCP contexts investigated, the context most similar to conventional sport basis on family socialization and facilitates reproduction, while the context most distinct from conventional sport attracts other adolescents and clears the ground for self governance and an ?adolescent lifestyle?