Introduction: why a research handbook on gender and diversity in sport management

The purpose of this handbook is to bring together work by international scholars to explicitly address gender and diversity in sport management. We do so by situating this research within critical sociological theoretical frameworks that focus on understanding how individuals or groups engaged in leading or managing sport are situated in the social world. The goal of this introductory chapter is to sketch the need for the book, its aim and its contents. We summarize the previous research on gender in sport management and then focus on insights the authors provide in their focus on processes and practices that work to exclude certain groups and favor others. This chapter, then, serves as the framing for the various theoretical approaches used by the various authors, how these can highlight the gendered ways of organizing sport, how they are experienced and may be sustained, disrupted, and challenged

Embodied collaborative writing in graduate dance education

This paper explores how embodied writing can inform teaching, learning, and research presentation in graduate-level dance education in a kinesiology faculty. The focus is on a graduate dance course “The Dancing Body in Motion”, which combines the anatomical analysis of the physical body, social theory, and lived dance experiences to promote more embodied and holistic teaching and learning. The authors, an instructor and a student of the course, share their experiences and reflections on the course through an embodied presentation of a dialogue that combines the instructor’s lecture notes, the student’s learning journal entries, and their reflections both separately and in conversation with each other. Their reflections offer insights into how the body and mind, material and social body, and practice and theory can all be brought together using embodied writing practices, such as a learning journal and performance ethnography, in a dance performance

Dancing within postmodernism

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Dancing within postmodernism

We're in a dark classroom quietly watching Aborigines dance in an exotic Australian night. They move in brilliant patterns: sudden high jumps of energy, trancing rhythms of instruments we've never seen, constantly stomping feet, twisting torsos. We see these moves transferred to a Western dance stage by a Dutch ballet company. Suddenly we don't like it. The dance has lost something; as if the electrical stage lights have destroyed the exotic feeling of stomping feet. The dance has become too sterile'”it seems pointless

Understanding Effective Coaching: A Foucauldian Reading of Current Coach Education Frameworks

Drawing on a modified version of Foucault’s (1972) analysis of discursive formations, we selected key coach education texts in Canada to examine what discourses currently shape effective coaching in Canada in order to detect what choices Canadian coaches have to know about “being an effective coach.” We then compared the most salient aspects of our reading to the International Sport Coaching Framework. Our Foucauldian reading of the two Canadian coach education websites showed that the present set of choices for coaches to practice “effectively” is narrow and that correspondingly the potential for change and innovation is limited in scope. Our comparison with the International Sport Coaching Framework, however, showed more promise as we found that its focus on the development of coach competences allowed for different coaching knowledges and coaching aims than a narrow focus on performance and results. We then conclude this Insights Paper by offering some comments on the implications of our Foucauldian reading as well as some suggestions to address our concerns about the dominance of certain knowledges and the various effects of this dominance for athletes, coaches, coach development and the coaching profession at large

“Good Athletes Have Fun”: a Foucauldian reading of university coaches’ uses of fun

Fun is deeply ingrained in the ways we talk about and understand sport: Having fun is what makes sport positive and healthy. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective, we problematize how fun, a psychological construct, informs coaches’ practices. Interviews with 10 varsity coaches from a Canadian university indicated that the coaches used fun to overcome the ‘grind’ of physical skill training. In addition, fun was used to develop and naturalize a need for athletes’ positive psychological traits and skills. In their training contexts, thus, the coaches clearly employed fun to reinforce their use of a number of dominant disciplinary training practices. As a result, instead of operating as a positive force for athlete engagement, the incorporation of fun further legitimized and perpetuated coaches’ ‘normal’ training practices