Safeguarding in sport has emerged as a critical priority for sport psychology practice, research, and policy. However, the development and implementation of safeguarding measures are significantly influenced by cultural contexts. Research highlighting issues of contextual fit when Western-born, rights-based safeguarding frameworks are applied across diverse geo-cultural logics and norms, and across sporting environments and levels. Despite growing policy attention and the expansion of safeguarding initiatives, systematic monitoring and evaluation remain underdeveloped in many settings.

The 2027 Global Sport Business Association Conference invites participants to examine what is emerging, what is accelerating, and what must be reimagined. As sport continues to connect with entertainment, technology, tourism, health, education, and entrepreneurship, new opportunities are emerging across every level of the industry. These changes raise important questions about how sport is created, experienced, monetized, governed, and studied. Sessions may explore topics such as global sport markets, athlete entrepreneurship, sport technology, fan engagement, sponsorship and branding, sport tourism and more.

Esports is often portrayed as a rapidly expanding cultural field, yet its global development has been marked by an increasing concentration of commercial power. As publishers, media platforms, and tournament organisers consolidate control over competitive infrastructures, the space for non-professional forms of esports appears to narrow. This peer review article by Anna Brus and David Ekholm critically examines the institutionalisation of organised amateur esports within DGI, Denmark’s second largest sport association, through a qualitative case study using documents and interviews.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

Gerald R. Gems’ latest book Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport (Lexington Books) examines the historical role of sport as both a mental and physical remedy during the late-nineteenth-century epidemic of neurasthenia in the US, a debilitating neurological condition that gripped American society. We asked Scott Fleming, seasoned scholar of sport studies, for a review. He found Gem’s book thoroughly enjoyable, rigorously researched, engagingly written, and dealing with this neurasthenia epidemic, the curing of which prescribed sport, exercise and physical activity.

Bringing together leading experts and a mix of young and senior scholars from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Women in a Digitized Sports Culture: Nordic Perspectives (Routledge) presents new empirical research and critical theoretical perspectives at the intersection of gender, sports, media and technology. Our reviewer is Angela Stănescu, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and she finds that the collection is an important academic contribution to sports and media scholarships, suitable for researchers and students who want better to understand gender inequalities in sports.

In Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears (Lexington Books), editors Jack Black and Joseph S. Reynoso with contributors in various ways explore the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. Our reviewer of this eagerly awaited book is Kutte Jönsson, and perhaps the fact that he is a philosopher rather than psychologist of sport goes some way to explain his satisfaction, nay, enthusiasm over this collection.

This conference is a combination of experience and research by members of the academic community, stakeholders in the sports system and our celebrated athletes. The program is conceptually divided into two parts, the first will address the topics of the legal framework of the human rights of female athletes and children, the protection and rights of female athletes to motherhood, aspects of the social and legal protection of female athletes. The second part of the program is a round table on the topic: The right to motherhood, health care and protection of female athletes and the preservation of the right to compete.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

The 15th Annual International Conference of Czech Philosophy of Sport will take place at the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport (FTVS), Charles University, Prague. We plan as usual to organise an in-person meeting, with no online presentations this year. The conference will be in English. We cordially invite you to participate in this event.

Denna doktorandtjänst utlyses i samarbete med Forskarskolan inom det utbildningsvetenskapliga området som erbjuder en sammanhållen miljö för forskarutbildning inom det utbildningsvetenskapliga området vid Umeå universitet. Du kommer att kombinera din forskarutbildning vid en institution med att vara en del av en dynamisk, tvärvetenskaplig doktorandgrupp och få tillgång till nationella och internationella forskningsnätverk. Som doktorand i forskarskolan kommer du att bidra till kunskapsutveckling inom området, till gagn för forskare likväl som för lärare och andra pedagogiska professioner.

In Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers (University of Chicago Press), Ugo Corte examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collective fun in a dangerous setting; how they push one another’s limits, nourish a lifestyle, advance the sport and, in some cases, make a living based on their passion for the sport. Mads Skauge obviously enjoyed reading this sociological treat(ise), heavy on theory, one of the best books of relevance to the sociology of sport in recent years – and written by an “outsider”!

In three short years, the Milwaukee Bucks went from merely an idea to NBA champions. What started as a quest by Marvin Fishman to get Milwaukee back in the big leagues attracted a hard-working coach in Larry Costello and some of the biggest talents in the game of basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson. Jordan Treske’s Building the Milwaukee Bucks (McFarland) covers the Bucks story, not altogether successfully, according to Łukasz Muniowski, but well enough to provide a lesson on how to treat your former stars and deal with the aftermath of the breakup of a potential dynasty.

The role of sport in society has always been tied to boundaries and identities – actively creating, reinforcing, or dismantling them. Observing societies through sports gives a unique perspective for analysis and deeper understanding. This is why we are organising a section at the Annual Conference of the Hungarian Sociological Association to invite scholars and early career researchers to discuss sports’ role in society.

When the IOC recently announced its new policy about eligibility in the female category (no male physiological advantage permitted), there was push-back from supporters of the previous, all-inclusive, IOC policy (the Framework Document from 2021). According to Jon Pike and Miroslav Imbrišević their arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, as they claim to have shown in their previous essay “The Ethics of Sex Verification”. They decided to expand their rebuttal and invite colleagues from other disciplines to help with scrutinizing arguments that oppose the IOC policy.

Panathlon is an International Movement for the promotion and dissemination of culture and sporting ethics, according to the official recognition of the IOC, and it aims to deepen, promote and defend the values of sport as a tool for training and enhancing the individual and as a vehicle of solidarity between people and communities around the world. The word “Panathlon” is of Greek origin, and can be translated with “group of sport disciplines” and its motto “Ludis Iungit” means “united by sport". Giorgio Chinellato, President of Panathlon International has the pleasure of inviting you to attend the 23rd Panathlon International Congress “75 Years Inspiring Unity Through Sport”.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

In his new book Blue Chippers from the Emerald Isle: A history of Irish footballers and scholarships in the USA in the twentieth century (Peter Lang Publishing), Conor Curran focuses on how players were recruited, their playing and educational experiences of the soccer scholarships, and the extent to which their scholarships facilitated their employment in professional football and in work related to their degrees after leaving university. Our reviewer Hans Bolling would have liked to see the study situated within a wider educational and career history framework.

The Olympic Stadium as Home: Architecture, Memory and Belongings a live online event organised by the Olympic Studies Research Centre (OSRC) at the University of East London. On behalf of the OSRC, we are pleased to announce the second in our series of Live Online Events. In collaboration with the London Festival of Architecture, we share details of our event focusing on the theme of Olympic Architecture. Guest speakers are Geraint John, and John and Margaret Gold. The event is free but registration is required.

In When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury), Conor Heffernan shows how the 19th century was critical for the development of the modern fitness industry, and how the globalization of physical culture was entangled in, and spread by, concepts of nationalism, gender, race, empire and medicine. Joe Piggin is our reviewer, and he soon found that his own interest in fitness resonates with the author’s. The book, he contends, is an illuminating education into how and why we hold the ideas we do about fitness, and why we devote so much of our time and energy to it.

Rhythmic gymnastics is an aesthetic sport that combines the elegance of classical ballet and modern dance with the strength and explosiveness of artistic gymnastics. In competition, pre-choreographed routines are performed to music. The findings in Marte Gram’s Ph.D. project show that health challenges such as overuse injuries, urinary incontinence, and symptoms related to the menstrual cycle are widespread among young female athletes within aesthetic sports.

With inspiration from Erving Goffman’s theory, this peer review study by Mathilde Hallgren, Nanna Rønne and Ulrik Wagner investigates how online interaction affects Strava-users’ running experiences and self-presentations. Through semi-structured interviews supplemented by netnographic observations, Strava is analyzed as a performative scene where physical and social ideals are staged and negotiated. The study identifies how Strava’s visual feedback mechanism and interactions from other users both strengthen motivation and create performance pressures.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

Drawing from across twenty-five years of interdisciplinary scholarship, Jeffrey W, Kassing’s collection of articles from the Soccer & Society journal States of Play: Soccer and Society Perspectives on the Global Game in America (Routledge) documents the development of soccer along five interrelated trajectories. Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen has read an interesting, welcome and well-timed text that will be of interest to scholars working on the cultural, historical and social dimensions of soccer. As intended, the collection illuminates both the challenges and potential of soccer in the US by signposting the reader towards the key trajectories in the literature.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) is currently gathering input for its globally recognized Fitness Trends Survey for 2027. This annual initiative plays a critical role in identifying emerging directions, evaluating evolving practices, and guiding evidence-based decision-making across the health, fitness, and performance landscape. The results are widely referenced by practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and organizations worldwide. Your participation would contribute directly to a more accurate and representative understanding of where our field is heading.