Tag: Arnošt Svoboda

Social cohesion has been a buzzword among public policymakers for the past 25 years. Sport for Social Cohesion: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, edited by Karen Petry and Louis Moustakas (Routledge) looks at the role that sport can play in fostering social cohesion. Alan Bairner notes that the book should come as a relief in an increasingly incoherent world, and he finds it thought-provoking. “Like me, many will find some of it frustrating. Others, not yet mired in cynicism, may well find it inspiring.”

With sport sustaining a prominent place in international development policymaking, discourse and delivery, the collected volume Handbook of Sport and International Development (Edward Elgar) investigates the role that different sport initiatives – from community-focused projects to large-scale events – can play across a great variety of development contexts. Our reviewers Derrick Charway and Umair Asif are appreciative of the comprehensive approach and they find the critical stance vital to combat the narratives about the “inherent purity and goodness of sport” (Coakley).

IRSS is a peer reviewed academic journal. Its main purpose is to disseminate research and scholarship on sport throughout the international academic community. The journal publishes research articles of varying lengths, as well as book and media reviews. The Forum Editor’s pick from the current issue: The framed and contested meanings of sport mega-event ‘legacies’: A case study of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games by Jamal A. Mckenzie, Jan A. Lee Ludvigsen, Andrea Scott-Bell, and John W. Hayton (open access).

SSJ publishes original research, framed by social theory, on exercise, sport, physical culture, and the (physically active) body. The journal publishes peer-reviewed empirical, theoretical, and position papers; book reviews; and critical essays. The Forum Editor’s pick from the current issue: We’ve Come a Long Way, But We Could Be Doing Better: Gendered Commentary in U.S. Media Coverage of the 1999 and 2019 Women’s World Cup by Eileen Díaz McConnell, Neal Christopherson, Michelle Janning.

Five hundred pages, forty-five chapters, forty-nine authors – the Routledge Handbook of Tennis: History, Culture and Politics is a veritable treasure trove for academic tennis aficionados. Edited by renowned tennis historian Robert J. Lake, the volume elicited numerous unsolicited enthusiastic exclamations of appreciation and joy from our reviewer, renowned historian of Swedish tennis Johnny Wijk. Actually, his only complaint was the glaring paucity of Swedish tennis.