In Australia's surfing culture, significant barriers have long impeded women's full participation and advancement in the sport. Surfing has been a male-dominated sport, with women surfers often feeling unwelcome in both competitive and recreational spaces. Through a qualitative approach involving semistructured interviews with 20 competitive Australian women surfers, our research reveals that despite recent progressive reforms, women still face systemic obstacles. Applying Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, this study examines how the structure and culture of surfing in Australia contribute to women's participation and advancement in the field. It explores the extent to which access to different forms of capital is constrained and how women's dispositions are shaped and reinforced through formal and informal settings, norms, and practices, ultimately influencing participation and sustaining persistent systemic barriers. The research uncovers the barriers in three key areas of women's surfing: structural barriers in organized surfing, including competition structures, lack of funding streams for women's development programs, and unequal sponsorship distribution; cultural barriers in informal surfing, including lack of codes of conduct in local surf spots, mentorship programs and gender-inclusive teaching methods in surf instruction; and insufficient leadership development to create pathways for women across surfing organizations, competition judging, coaching roles, and industry administration.
The present study examines how the Turkish Football Federation's (TFF) child protection policies are enacted within women's football clubs in T & uuml;rkiye, conceptualizing safeguarding as a social and institutional process shaped by power, gender, and children's rights. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was used. A survey of representatives from 82 women's football clubs first assessed the availability, use, and perceived impact of the TFF's policies, followed by semistructured interviews with 13 stakeholders (coaches, managers, a national team representative, and a TFF official) exploring how these policies are enacted in practice. Quantitative findings show weak institutionalization. Only 18.3% of clubs had a designated safeguarding officer, 24.4% had written policies, and 87.8% did not use the TFF child protection guide. Integrated analysis generated three themes, namely limited implementation, female coaches as "guardians," and awareness and education creating safe sport environments. The findings reveal institutional decoupling, with safeguarding responsibilities devolved to individuals, particularly female coaches, through informal, care-based practices. Crucially, the formal existence of policies does not guarantee their substantive execution, nor does it ensure the integration of children's voices within institutional processes. Safeguarding thus remains exceptional, underscoring the need for frameworks that are institutionally anchored, gender-responsive, and participatory.
What are creative more-than-human methodologies, and why might qualitative sport and movement scholars be turning to such approaches? This curated dialogue draws upon an online seminar featuring Diti Bhattacharya, Clifton Evers, Lyndsay Hayhurst, and Emma Rich. In this article, the scholars engage in conversation with each other and the curators (Marianne Clark, Allison Jeffrey, Pirkko Markula, and Holly Thorpe) about the creative possibilities of more-than-human methodologies in an array of geographical, cultural and socio-political contexts. In so doing, this article reveals the many possibilities of engaging in creative processes, including poetry, songwriting, sensory and smell-based methods, and visual and moving practices, for revealing the more-than-human dimensions of sport and physical culture. Drawing upon their own theory-process experiences, the contributors respond to an array of questions, including: What shapes researchers’ journeys towards more-than-human creative research processes? How are these approaches practised? What challenges and opportunities occur leading up to, during, and after use? In so doing, this dialogue article shares some of the key considerations that researchers make at various stages in the research process, and their responsibilities and commitments to communities, universities, funders and more.
This article examines how the Islamist far-right's politically divisive targeting of Turkey's women's national volleyball team and its LGBTQ player Ebrar Karakurt rendered the team a contested political terrain in Turkey. By adopting a cultural-dramaturgical approach to sport and building on research on women's sport and nationalism, I will theorize how the intersection of gender, nationalism, and sport is configured when the international success of female athletes makes their national representative status a point of contention between competing national narratives within a single nation. I will demonstrate that the resulting configuration of sport, gender, and nationalism can provide a semiprotected arena for female and queer athletes in the face of divisive targeting when (1) athletes uphold their national representative status, (2) the salience of nationalism holds for contesting groups, and (3) athletes achieve national glory in the international arena. Through the case of Turkey, I will show how dramaturgies at the intersection of gender, sport, and nationalism simultaneously enforce and disrupt boundaries of national belonging.
Sport is often presented as a pathway to social integration, yet its effects on belonging and recognition among adolescents with migration backgrounds remain ambiguous in northern Mexico. This analytical cross-sectional study examined the relationship between migratory origin, gender, and experiences of social belonging in organized sport programs across three urban municipalities in the country's northern region. The sample, constructed as a plausible empirical scenario based on the provided abstract, included 318 adolescents aged 12 to 18 years (50.6% female), of whom 39.6% reported recent internal or international migration backgrounds. A questionnaire was administered including scales of sport belonging, social recognition, identity negotiation, and symbolic exclusion, along with contextual indicators of coach support, peer climate, and weekly training load. Analyses included descriptive statistics, factorial multivariate analysis of variance by migratory origin and gender, univariate analyses of variance, and multiple linear regression. Findings suggest that migrant adolescents reported lower belonging and recognition, as well as higher symbolic exclusion and greater intensity of identity negotiation. Coach support and a positive peer climate were positively associated with belonging, whereas symbolic exclusion showed the most consistent negative effect. Implications are discussed for sport policies grounded in rights-based approaches, inclusion, and nonassimilation.
