Suchergebnisse

Student volunteering during university has been widely championed for its purported benefits to both students and society alike. Internationally, universities have increasingly coupled student volunteering opportunities or embedded forms of service learning with sport-for-development programmes (SFD) as a means of contributing to strategic institutional objectives. However, there is a paucity of academic research that documents the social processes experienced by students as they converge with hard-to-reach client groups when volunteering on university-led SFD platforms. Therefore, and utilising data captured from semi-structured interviews ( n=40), this article explores the lived experiences of undergraduate students who volunteered on a sports-based community outreach project: the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project. Largely run by student volunteers, the SUNEE project delivers a raft of sports-based and personal development programmes to hard-to-reach groups. This article utilises Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas to illustrate the processes of initiation and integration that confer both membership upon student volunteers and their legitimacy as leaders, when working with the hard-to-reach clientele on the project.

The focus of this article centers around an established universities sports outreach program—the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project—and explores how its core workforce, student volunteers, perceive that they develop effective working relationships with the project's "hard-to-reach" clients. The SUNEE project represents an alliance between the region's five universities to tackle social exclusion, and promote and nurture social capital and civil responsibility through the vehicle of sports. This joined-up approach to sports development provides the region's student volunteers with vast opportunities to gain both experience and qualifications as sports coaches, mentors, and leaders by working with a range of hard-to-reach groups. To explore how the dynamics of the project influenced relationship statuses between SUNEE's diverse participants, from the perspective of the student volunteers, this article draws upon Robert Putnam's notion of social capital to interpret the experiences of the study's percipients ( n = 40). Captured using semi-structured interviews, students indicate that over the course of their participation in the project, social capital served both exclusionary and integrative functions, yet as time elapsed, social capital was increasingly generated between SUNEE's diverse participants, playing a crucial role in bringing both volunteers and hard-to-reach clients together.

The English Premier League possesses multiple global dimensions, including its clubs' economic ownership, player recruitment patterns and television broadcasts of its matches. The owner of Hull City Association Football Club's economic rights, Dr Assam Allam, announced plans to re-name the club 'Hull City Tigers' in an attempt to re-orientate the club towards seemingly lucrative East Asian, and specifically Chinese, markets in 2013. This article, first, draws upon Manuel Castells' work in The Rise of the Network Society to critically discuss the logic of Hull City's proposed reorientation to suit 'new middle class' consumers in China and the East Asian global region and second, uses the example to theoretically engage with Castells' idea that 'networks' replace 'hierarchies' as social structures. This leads to the argument that while these plans might intend to strengthen the club's financial position, they overlook a concern with local environments that Castells guides us toward. By looking toward the local consumer practices in China and the East Asian global region, Allam would find: (a) the normalisation in production and consumption of counterfeit club-branded sportswear and television broadcasts which makes increasing the club's revenues difficult; and (b) that the region's 'new middle classes' (marked by disposable income) are unlikely to foster support for Hull City, even if 'Tigers' is added to its name.

We can no longer claim that academic interest in the area of sport and social inclusion is lacking. Dedicated books, specialissues, commissioned reports, and landmark articles on the topic of social inclusion and sport have been produced by de-voted scholars. The same can be said for the burgeoning area of sport for development and peace. These relatively youngacademic fields seem to be struggling to create new fundamental theoretical insights about how organized sport can bothact as an inclusive space and as a vehicle for broader developmental outcomes. Despite scholarly advancements, thereremains a number of empirical and theoretical gaps. The aim of this special issue is to critically reflect on issues relatedto sport, development, and inclusion, and to do so via transdisciplinary and intersectoral perspectives. By making such acontribution, we aim to open up new research pathway.

This article examines the ways in which envisioned sport mega-event legacies are publicly framed, communicated and contested. By employing Bourdieusian field theory, the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games (CWG) as a case, and drawing upon documentary and media analysis, this article questions how CWG 2022 legacies were framed in a pre-event context. The article makes two key arguments. First, dominant actors within the mega-event field framed a considerable part of their pre-event legacies in terms of intangible inclusivity legacies relating to the host city's local communities, workforce and volunteering practices. Second, alongside these framed legacies, counterclaims emerged from actors on a civil society level, illustrative of a wider scepticism toward mega-events' effects in the present day. Whilst limited scholarship has examined CWG 2022 to date, this paper also advances scholarship on sport mega-events' socio-political legacies whilst it, theoretically, unpacks Bourdieu's tools of 'field' and 'doxa' in a new context.