Tag: Sepandarmaz Mashreghi

Featuring a range of mega-event case studies and conceptual discussions, Katherine Dashper’s edited collection Sport, Gender and Mega-Events (Emerald) and considers how these highly mediatised global phenomena both reflect and help shape broader ideas about gender, sex and identity in and beyond sport. Sepandarmaz Mashreghi is our reviewer, and having some doubts as to the transforming powers of mega-events in terms of gender inequalities within sports, she still finds the collection to be a valuable contribution to the issue of sport mega-event and gender.

In September 2021, Sepandarmaz Mashreghi successfully defended her PhD thesis in Sport Sciences, Decolonial Re-existence and Sports: Stories of Afghan youth in Sweden (Malmö University). Professor Kristin Walseth was a member of the examining committee, and she kindly responded to our request for a book review. Our reviewer emphasizes the pioneer quality of the study and its contribution to the important field of decolonial studies, but regrets that she never really gets to know the Afghan youths.

Academics in various disciplines are writing about sport. Sport in Society is a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary forum for academics to discuss the growing relationship of sport to significant areas of modern life. The Forum Editor’s pick from the current issue: We exist, play sports, and will persist: everyday lives of Palestinian sportswomen through the lens of the ‘politics of invisibility’ by Hillary Kipnis.

In The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (University of California Press), authors Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell and Thomas F. Carter explore how sport both shapes and is shaped by the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which we live. We asked Dr. Sepandarmas Mashreghi to read and review their effort for idrottsforum.org. Her well-balanced review points out the interesting and scholarly rewarding features that by far overshadow the sometimes monotonous tone.

Grounded in Indigenous, borderland, Chicana and Black feminist knowledges as well decolonial thought, Sepandarmaz Mashreghi’s thesis contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the field of sport and exercise in relation to young asylum seekers and migration research. The participatory analysis demonstrates that for the Afghan youth in this study, sport and physical activity was not a distinct entity, rather it was intertwined with various aspects of their lives.

In this essay, written in the final stages of her PhD education, Sepand Mashreghi looks back at the very first presentation of her choice of doctoral project, and the inevitable response – “where is the sport science in this?”. She then recounts her own journey through, and out of, the traditional social sciences, searching for, and eventually finding, the decolonial option, with the aim to contribute to decolonizing knowledge and being, and making the survival of the otherwise possible.

SSSF, a multidisciplinary social sciences sport studies journal, welcomes articles that deal with sport and social change and social stability in a wide sense, articles about the profound and comprehensive processes affecting sport. The Forum Editor’s pick from the current issue: National and Organizational Culture in Norwegian Elite Sport: The Account of National Handball Head Coaches by Eivind Å. Skille, Per Øystein Hansen, Frank Abrahamsen & Stiliani “Ani” Chroni.

Despite a call for rethinking the epistemological understanding of the acculturation and its relation to sport and exercise, European sport and exercise psychology has remained unchallenged territory. Sepandarmaz Mashregi’s critical overview is a call for decolonizing the knowledge and scholarship within sport and exercise psychology by utilizing transformative approaches that centralize the voices of the cultural ’other’.

Sine Agergaard’s latest book Rethinking Sports and Integration: Developing a Transnational Perspective on Migrants and Descendants in Sports (Routledge) offers a critical cultural analysis of the idea that sport can promote the integration of migrants and their descendants. Our reviewer Sepandarmaz Mashreghi is generally positive to the new perspective put forward by Agergaard.

The experiences of ethnic ‘Other’ females in sport is the focus of a new edited collection, Race, Gender and Sport: The Politics of Ethnic ‘Other’ Girls and Women (Routledge) by Aarti Ratna & Samaya Farooq Samie. We asked Sepandarmaz Mashregi for a review and she obliged by submitting an appreciative appraisal, albeit not uncritical, and as informative and enlightening as ever.