Never has the domain of sports coaching been so inundated with "secondary information." In high-performance contexts, for example, coaches are routinely presented with detailed reports specifying features about an athlete's or team's performance. Here, we question whether such detailed secondary information has led us to know "too…

In this paper, findings from an investigation into the gender imbalance in swim coaching in Australia, particularly at the higher levels of accreditation, are reported. Stories of the experience of two elite female swim coaches were analysed with reference to the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Analysis found that some male coaches and…

Becoming educated physically need not be confined to gyms, playing fields, dance studios and aquatic complexes. A case in point is that of swimming which serves notice on training the body exclusively by offering an ecologically attuned, movement pedagogy. As an exemplar for the cultivation of the "body-subject" and its implication in…

Is it possible for young people to develop intercultural understanding through an ocean-crossing sailing voyage? What would happen to intercultural communication in a tall-ship space? This article unpacks the process of interculturality construction and participants' identity negotiation within an ocean-sailing setting. It applies an analytical…

Research shows that athletes across levels and sports have been subjected to maltreatment with non-sexualised forms such as psychological abuse and neglect found to be the most common. With the normalisation of many of these forms of abuse occurring in sports, researchers have called for the 'safeguarding' of athletes to focus on prevention…

In this paper, narrative analysis using a story analyst approach is used to explore how three former athletes (i.e. amateur and elite swimmers) self-managed their abuse experiences post-sport with a focus on the use, and meaning, of 'indirect self-injury' forms. Using the concept of 'emotion work', the swimmers' stories show how they reconfigured…

This paper draws upon education policy sociology, and sport coaching literature, in critically examining sport coaches as policy actors. Stephen Ball and colleagues' conceptualisation of different policy actor positions and roles provided the framework for research that investigated how eight professional swimming coaches in Victoria, Australia,…

Sociological investigations into the athlete-medical practitioner relationship are scarce due to medical bias for positivist epistemologies. The aim of this research was to identify the scope and purpose of medical interventions for four athletes, within the context of social processes that enable medicine to claim athletic bodies as objects of…

This paper centres on one researcher's narrative inquiry of embodied experience. The purpose of this paper is to initiate and extend dialogue which highlights potential possibilities and limitations for those researchers and participants who choose to engage with the narrative inquiry approach. Of special concern are four points or evocations that…

Given that research outside of sport and exercise has found that stigma may cause severe consequences (e.g. depression), it is important to explore the concept in regard to its connection to socio-cultural issues in the development and persistence of stigmatisation in sporting contexts. Analytic autoethnography and Goffman's theory of stigma was…

There has been increasing interest in recent years in the significance of a sense of place in the literature of outdoor adventure education. In the UK relationships between outdoor education and the environment still appear largely focused on the science of the natural environment and the activity in question. In this paper, we present empirical…

The bulk of interest in the role that interaction plays in learning in sport and physical education (PE) has focused on peer interaction at the expense of teacher-student interaction. This article redresses this imbalance in the literature by reporting on a study that inquired into the nature of teacher-student interaction and its effect on…

In recent years there has been a growing interest in questions related to embodiment and learning. Within the field of "body pedagogics" great efforts have been made to develop theory and methodology that can deal with the corporeal aspects of experience and knowledge without adopting any form of dualistic conceptions of body/mind and…

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring…

This paper offers a genealogical account of safeguarding in sport. Drawing specifically on Foucault's work, it examines the "politics of touch" in relation to the social and historical formation of child protection policy in sports coaching. While the analysis has some resonance with the context of coaching as a whole, for illustrative…