This article examines how inspiration, as a public feeling or affect, is central to the legacy claims of mega sport events, such as the Olympic and Paralympic Games, in effecting change in how everyday citizens feel, think and act through sport participation. In this article we examine how inspiration is mobilized as an intimate affective register within the institutionalized and normative parameters of sport legacy plans through analysis of official documents produced for the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games, released between 2021 and 2023. In addition, we also analyze a collection of five short video documentaries on inspiration produced by the International Olympic Committee. Using a post-humanist feminist lens we introduce the idea of 'affective disjuncture' to explore the ways citizens are urged to be inspired through mega sport events. Mapping the affective ecologies that mobilize inspiration in the imagined potential of mega sports events, we identify the limitations and possibilities of thinking outside the normative parameters of pride, nationhood, and individual competitiveness for communities.

While research on disability sport coaching has increased in recent years, very little has focused on how athletes experience coaching, particularly in relation to gender equity. We address this gap in coaching knowledge by exploring the experiences of women with disability in para-sport from an intersectional perspective that understands the way that gender and disability co-constitute each other. Drawing on qualitative research, this article considers how elite women para-athletes respond to coaching dynamics and techniques - how they are affected by what coaches say and do within a more-than-human context. Our feminist approach traces the affective dynamics that are produced through coaching as an assemblage that perpetuates epistemic injustice in relation to embodied capacities structured by ableism and sexism. By exploring the lived experiences of Australian elite para-athletes, we attune to the affective flows of frustration, shame, feelings of inferiority and exclusion that emerge in response to a system organised through gendered ableism. The findings of this study contribute to advancing a relational understanding of the affective dynamics of coaching knowledge, practice and education to identify injustice and open up disabled ways of knowing.

Purpose: To understand and respond to community sport needs in regional Victoria (Australia) to prevent and respond to gender based violence (GBV). The research followed a developmental evaluation approach where the information gathered was used to support resource development and implementation in real-time. Methods: Data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with community sports clubs, community sports stakeholders, academic experts, and community health organisations. Topics discussed: • Needs of community sport clubs to prevent and respond to GBV. • Current context and resources available. • Stakeholders involved. All discussions were transcribed verbatim and analysed against key themes established with the aim of developing resources and a support structure for community sports clubs. Results: 1. A centralised support system GBV is fragmented with multiple stakeholders across sport and health involved in prevention and response. This complex environment made it difficult for community sports clubs to access relevant information. A support system was established using the Regional Sport Assembly (RSA) as the central point of contact for community sports clubs, supported by an online portal. The RSA staff were found not to have the knowledge or expertise to adequately respond to GBV and training was provided to the workforce. • An awareness campaign Community sports clubs and individuals within those clubs were on a spectrum of readiness to prevent and respond to GBV. There therefore needed to be a variety of resources and support developed to meet clubs where they were at on this spectrum (i.e. ready to not ready). In addition, some were not fully aware of what constituted GBV. An awareness campaign was developed and implemented. Conclusion: GBV is a complex and fragmented issue with multiple stakeholders across the sport and health sectors. By taking a partnership approach the strengths of each partner were used. The Regional Sport Assembly was used to connect and support community sports clubs, and the strengths of the health organisations were used to upskill the sport workforce and support the development of relevant resources for community sports clubs. Support/Funding Source: This study was funded by the Victorian State Government Preventing Violence Through Sport Grants Program.

This article draws on feminist theorizations of affect and emotion to explore conversations with coaches about how gender difference figures in professional relationships with women athletes. We conceptualize the micropolitics of the research encounter as a feminist intra-vention that disrupts and generates different ways of knowing gendered bodies in sport. Our analysis seeks to contribute to debates in sport coaching and education through a feminist research approach that works with what affect can 'do' to disrupt and generate gendered ways of knowing sporting bodies that challenges essentialism (biology/culture, male/female). More specifically, this research offers important insights into ways of engaging in productive dialogue about gender inequity at a time when expectations of professional practice are rising within sport.

For people with disability to flourish in sport, providers require more complex understandings of how ableist norms are entangled in sporting cultures. This article examines how neoliberal–ableist logics structure everyday sport contexts, focusing on swimming as one of the most popular sports for people with disability in Australia. We report on the quantitative and qualitative data produced through an online survey of disabled swimmers, analyzing four major themes: disability knowledge deficits, overvaluing Paralympic classification, discrimination in club cultures, and participants’ pleasure and pride in swimming. We rethink inclusion beyond ableist imperatives to “fit into” problematic sport cultures by exploring the epistemic shift toward a more relational, disability-led understanding that happens when disabled bodyminds “misfit.”

Mega-sporting event legacies have attracted academic interest and examination over the last two decades. The development of legacy plans has become central to sport event bidding, acting as a means of prioritizing outcomes by governing bodies and host governments. Through legacy plans, mega-sport events 'perform' as catalysts for change throughout various phases. Drawing on an appraisal of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games official legacy documents and selected interviews, we consider the performative role of legacy in what counts as data, whose voices are included and how they are represented in official narratives. Using feminist theory, we analyse what is (un)stated and how discourses come to matter in legacy narratives. Our analysis found that legacy plans reinforced persistent issues of gender inequity through broad statements with few details. By mobilizing a feminist notion of performativity we identify important insights that can support a more sustainable, equitable and gender-responsive approach.

Purpose The FIFA Women’s World Cup (WWC) 2023 was co-hosted by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and was the first WWC to require legacy planning to develop women’s football. We examine the relevance of the legacy plans for an important fan segment within football: LGBTQ+ self-identifying women and non-binary fans. We also sought to explore how a queer perspective might inform the future of football through WWC legacies. Design/methodology/approach We engage with queer theory to de-stabilise legacy norms, placing women and non-binary LGBTQ + at the centre of knowledge production. We distributed a mixed-method survey to fans at the WWC 2023. In keeping with our queer approach, we challenged many of the norms of this method. Findings The respondents were largely unaware of the legacy documents. The respondents identified support for football’s inclusive ethos but argued that more could be done to celebrate LGBTQ + athletes and supporters; they envisaged a future of football that would be inclusive of intersectional identities; and they imagined queer visibility through the use of language and symbols by FIFA, national and local organisations. Originality/value This paper contributes a unique, queer analysis of major sport event legacy promises to advance sport management knowledge of diverse fans. The richness of the findings shows the breadth and depth of possibility for alternative, queered futures in football.

Elite sport has been a site of harm, with issues of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, including a strong culture of body shaming, and consequent heightened incidences of disordered eating. In the context of Paralympic sport, the dominant narrative of empowerment for people with disability has obscured the ambivalence and felt tensions for para-sportswomen where harm is experienced. There has been little research that explores the gendered conditions generating body shaming and emotional abuse. Drawing upon a feminist posthumanist approach, this article explores how women para-athletes negotiate their experience of body shaming through the entangled power relations of high-performance knowledge, practice and culture. We draw upon 'affect as method' as an approach that engages with interview data involving women elite para-athletes and the embodied experience of the first author. The entanglement of the researchers and participants is recognised in writing through affect as an extension and disruption of traditional qualitative assumptions about representation (self-present subjects revealing the truth of their experience through in-depth digital interviews). Through this feminist theory-method, we argue that paying attention to the felt affective intensities of body shaming in the research encounter rendered the experience intelligible as harm-emotional abuse - in a move against the normalised invisible harms that sport cultures can perpetuate.

This article offers a more-than-human perspective on an equine assisted learning programme undertaken by marginalised young people attending a flexi-school in Australia. In contrast with therapist led equine programmes, our research examined horse assisted activities as a site of embodied learning. Paying attention to the affective dimension of horse-human relationality we explored how student and teacher narratives articulated learning in terms of affective pedagogies (being moved to learn differently). We discuss the theory-method tensions that arose through our shift from a mixed methods humanist design to a more-than-human analysis. Questioning the limitations of traditional humanist theories of attachment and individualised agency, we trace the agentic capacities afforded by the horse-human learning assemblage involving horses, volunteer coaches, young people, teachers, yards, grooming tools, etc. Our article contributes to explorations of more-than-human learning at the intersection of embodied movement, therapeutic interventions and informal education.

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and expectations, and different affective responses to such regulations. In this paper we re-turn with the voices of 17 women who were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early stages of the pandemic and working in the sport or fitness industry before, during and after the first national lockdown. Drawing upon insights from feminist materialist theory, we explore how indoor fitness studios materialised as 'riskscapes' in women's negotiations of the affects that shaped their re-turn. Whereas some women experienced fear and anxiety in re-turning to familiar spaces 'made strange' through new risks, responsibilities, routines and objects (i.e. sanitizer, floor markings), others came to new appreciations for the importance of human connection offered through shared movement experiences. Conceptualizing these different affective relations as processes of becoming, we trace the multiple and more-than-human relations through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways of knowing-moving--becoming in the re-turn to fitness. Recognising the effects of continued uncertainties, this paper contributes material feminist insights through women's affective engagements with the social world, surfacing more-than-human wellbeing in the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces 'made strange' in and through pandemic space and time.

This chapter explores how feminist new materialist theories offer different insights for doing sport management research and practice differently. We explore the onto-ethico-epistemological assumptions that inform material feminist approaches to knowledge and consider the implications of thinking relationally for transforming normative understandings of sport management (white, masculine, heterosexual, human centered). From this perspective, we consider how gender matters beyond binary thinking - as an entangled material and discursive phenomenon - through the individual, institutional and sociocultural dynamics that shape the sport ecosystem. Feminist new materialism can advance a relational understanding of sport management knowledge and practice to better recognize the entangled, dynamic systems enabling and impeding change. We address the current gaps, silences and silos that shape sport management theory-method approaches to questions of injustice and knowledge production.

This article explores how gender and disability inequity is addressed in research, policy and organisational strategies that shape the Australian sporting landscape. By examining the most current annual reports and strategic plans of 31 national sport organisations, national disabled sport organisations, peak bodies, and government agencies, we identify the implications of siloed thinking that considers gender and disability to be separate forms of diversity. Our analysis outlines the limitations of organisational strategies, specific plans and even participation data for women with disability. We argue that an understanding of the nuanced experiences of women with disability is needed to inform policies and practices that advance equitable sport provision, making visible what women's disabled bodies can do and become through sport.

In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive process, bodies, hauntings, absences and excess, and the tensions and affective vulnerabilities that co-emerged through our process. We present four visual montages of the diffractive patterns that surfaced from the individual papers as nodal points and our creative collaborative processes of becoming-with the special issue. We conclude with some final thoughts on the process of diffracting the special issue, inviting the reader to join us in imagining new lines of flight, alternative possibilities for becoming a more response-able, more-than-human academic community.

The increasing prevalence of body dissatisfaction among young people is now well recognised with much of the existing literature making connections between media imagery and body dissatisfaction. Media literacy-based interventions continue to be rolled out in schools across the global north in an attempt to prevent body dissatisfaction. However, the pervasiveness of digital media in young people's lives has prompted questions about the adequacy of current theories of media literacy and associated school-based interventions. We explore how feminist theories focused on the affective, material and more-than-human offer different insights into new digital configurations of agency and mediated learning. We reflect on this potential through analysing empirical data from a study involving arts-based workshops in two schools in the South West of England. Our focus on affect and agency as relational and entangled has important implications for theory and practice in school-based body image programmes and media literacy approaches.

Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of "self" transformation at the "expense" of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women's empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist post-qualitative project seeks to do "research differently" through a generative ethos of knowledge production that is co-constituted with participants and the coach-researcher (Erin). We explore how a Thai boxing program-"fight camp"-worked through-with an affective feminist coaching pedagogy that sought to transform gendered patterns of movement mobilizing moments of discomfort and pleasure. This research practice involved attuning to the embodied dynamics of learning-coaching-the intra-actions of boxing-in terms of what these movement practices "do" and how they "affect" women in the process of becoming-fighters. We write through three provocations-"the drunk uncle," "get ugly with it," and "show and tell"-to engage readers in the affective relations entangled within the processes of coaching-researching MTB. Our post-qualitative research approach has implications for the provision of physical cultural practices and alternative coaching pedagogy more broadly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically shifted modes of communication and connection. For many, digital technologies have played critical roles in enabling ongoing relationships during extended periods of social isolation. Yet the modes of connection offered through such technologies have prompted new affective relations and digital intimacies. In this article, we draw upon interviews with 17 women working in the sport and fitness sector in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore their engagement with digital technologies during pandemic times. Each of the women responded to the nationwide lockdown by offering and participating in online fitness classes, using shared movement experiences to cultivate supportive emotional relations for their communities. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of feminist materialisms, this paper contributes to deeper understandings of how digital intimacies produce a reimagining of felt community relations through entanglements of technology, virtual touch and haptic connections. The co-constitution of physical-digital spaces is enacted by women through an ethos of care that is lived through moving bodies together-apart.

In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.