Fourteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

If Bitcoin hits the $1 million price target by 2030, the $100 investment will turn into $6,070, which represents a gain of 5,970% from now until 2030. The hypothetical investment will have an average annual return of 746.3% if the price target is achieved. (Benzinga, 2022). This current study introduced digital currency, especially bitcoin, as it was the first cryptocurrency created as an e-gold and replaced real gold in the 1990s. After the economic crisis of 2008 in the USA, the door was opened for Bitcoin in 2009 as a cryptocurrency. Still, unlike e-gold, bitcoin is not backed by real gold but by the offer and demand made by the business community. Bitcoin was a real success and made many millionaires, especially in 2013 and 2014 when the value of bitcoin reached its peak. (Silver, 2016). The current study explained the significance of the stock market to sports legislation and the current and future use of digital currency in the field of sports business. This recent descriptive study used a review of the literature and research analysis from different sources, including data, statistics, information, and sport analytics predictions, articles, magazines, editorials, and periodicals to understand the effects of using digital currency, particularly bitcoin, on the rapidly growing and unexpected sports business worldwide. Results indicated that Bitcoin is one of the digital coins but, through the last five years, happened to high improve in value. Moreover, digital currency should be used in sports business transactions to achieve significant financial benefits.

Ethical Issues Surrounding Female Athlete Reproductive Rights in a Digital Age

Olivia R. Howe
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This paper discusses a current research project which examines the ethical ambiguities of menstrual tracking in women’s sports today. Since the ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) and the consequent overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) in the US, debates surrounding menstrual health tracking for athletes have arisen, specifically due to the fear that this health data could be subpoenaed by the US Supreme Court and used against athletes who seek abortions (Blanco 2022). Research suggests that menstrual tracking of female athletes presents potential risks to ‘women’s autonomy, privacy, and safety in sport’ (Casto 2022, 1725). At present, philosophical and ethical insights into female athletes’ reproductive rights are particularly under-researched, and this project seeks to combine novel research in the female-specific sport sciences with present ethical debates in the philosophy of sports. By utilising feminist philosophies by the likes of Beauvoir (2011) and Young (2014), this study considers what constitutes reproductive rights for female athletes in Western societies, discussing feminist ethical issues of autonomy and privacy in a digital era.

Non-traditionally Aesthetic Body Types for Ideal Sport Performance

Nafees Alam
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

The general public often conflates traditionally aesthetic appeal with optimal sport-performance. Runners, bikers, swimmers, etc. are examples of athletes that generally pass the public's "eye test" for athleticism, indicating that they may be as athletic as they seem. Such is not always the case for NFL linemen, rugby players, shot putters, etc., suggesting to the general public that these athletes may not be as athletic as they seem. Contrary to popular opinion, athletes are just as likely to experience body image dissatisfaction as non-athletes, this is especially true for athletes that play sports and positions calling for non-traditionally aesthetic physique. Should these athletes eschew sport-performance for aesthetic appeal or should they eschew aesthetic appeal for sport-performance when the two are mutually exclusive? Athletes often employ a cost-benefit analysis to determine their answers to these questions and this paper discusses strategies on how to help athletes make decisions that are best for them as individuals.

Does the World of Sports Mirror the World of Managed Work?

Yusuf Hassan
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This study responds to the recent calls (Gino & Kouchaki, 2020; Jongman-Sereno & Leary, 2020; Hicks, Schlegel & Newman, 2019) to pay more attention to the importance of the concept of authenticity by enhancing our knowledge of its subjective meanings and tensions ascribed in the personal and professional space of individuals. Although, prior studies have examined authenticity in the context of traditional work settings, and its importance for social and political thinking (Taylor, 2007), has been duly acknowledged; sports, as a context has been largely ignored. In the backdrop of recent sports scandals, doping cases and eroding of the emancipatory and liberative values of sports, an understanding of the subjective meanings and tensions of authenticity for athletes has become crucial. This is because findings of prior studies suggest that an authentic self is capable of addressing issues pertaining to mental health, social adjustments and concerns related to the overall wellbeing of individuals. The distinction in beliefs, thoughts, ideas and perceptions shaped by the cultural, social and political environment, different individuals are expected to have a different connotation for what authenticity stands for them. Further, the quest for attaining an optimal balance between ‘authentic self’ and ‘accepted self’ should generate tensions is detrimental for the individual’s well-being. The current study explores the nature of challenges for authenticity in the form of tensions that obstructs the realization of the meanings of authentic for athletes.

A Level Playing Field? How a Governing Body Promotes Its Men's and Women's National Teams through Social Media

Steph Doehler
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This study examines and compares the coverage of both the England men’s and women’s national soccer teams by their governing body, The Football Association (FA), immediately before, during, and immediately following their respective 2020 and 2022 European Championships. Content analysis of two of the FA’s official Twitter accounts demonstrate some positive shifts in the general representation of the women’s soccer team. However, concerns remain regarding the FA’s social media strategy whereby they promote the women’s team through a discrete profile rather than their general Twitter account, which has a much larger following. This paper argues that social media provides governing bodies with an opportunity to effectively promote their women’s teams and, as such, they hold significant responsibility to achieve this should they wish to see more equitable promotion of women athletes in the wider media.

Women in Hell

Michael Rhett
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO Vince McMahon took North American professional wrestling from a group of regional organizations in the early 1980’s to the global powerhouse and cultural phenomenon it is today. Indeed, many professional wrestlers have crossed over into mainstream entertainment including Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and John Cena. These men, among other less recognized stars, such as Triple H, Bret Hart, The Undertaker, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage, were top draws for WWE. Obviously missing from this list are the women of WWE, who until recently, served as valets, enhancement talents, or participated in bra and panties matches, pillow fights, or traditional matches where they were not given time to display their ability. The sexualized and second-class roles women played and the matches in which they participated demonstrates they were in no way equal to their male counterparts. WWE fans were fed up and in early 2015 started #givedivasachance. Consequently, Triple H became the new head of talent and in Spring of 2016 the WWE’s Divas Revolution, later and more aptly named the Women’s Revolution, began. Then, in Fall of 2016, female wrestlers were initiated into equality with the men through a Hell in a Cell match, specifically its contract signing. However, to be accepted, their initiation was completed through a masculine-centric rhetorical process as evidenced through Geert Hofstede’s masculinity-femininity (MAS) cultural dimension. Thus, in order to women to be accepted, the women needed to act and talk like men.

The Application of Media Technology and the Improvement of Physical Activities and Bilingual Interaction in Child-friendly Communities in Chinese Coastal Cities

Yanying Chen
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

This study explores existing problems of public space in child-friendly communities, especially the space for for bilingual interaction and physical education, further to consider about how to learn from the experience of cities having been award the certificate of child-friendliness. This study has reviewed the physical, functional and neighborhood characteristics of four kinds of communities identified under the framework of ‘public relation-- neighborhood’. Meanwhile, this study has also reviewed the mode for constructing a ‘child-friendly community’ (Zhou, 2021) and ‘an ideal mode of supportive conditions for locally dependent groups, such as families with children and youth’ (Horelli, 2007). There are three existing problems in communities listed in the plan of developing ‘child-friendly city’ in China. Firstly, community with exploration and participatory culture simply provide public service for kids to passively immerse into education and physical activities. Secondly, communities with poor environmental conditions and low extent of media and technology in physical activities use cannot make citizens form the sense of community. Additionally, communities filled with commercial residential buildings and dissociated citizens lacks participatory culture and collective consensus. As a consequence, it is suggested to set up managerial staff and a community service team with study experience in USA, UK, Canada and Australia to change the status of children’s passive learning; secondly, to form the new pattern of co-governance by government and society and sharing benefits of multiple communities; lastly, to improve user experience of media technology and to construct integrating ecosystem of multiple media to achieve different regions globally.

Challenges and Best Practices for Sexual Violence Prevention and Education in Division I Athletics Departments

Katrina Garry, Molly Harry
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Sexual violence within member institutions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have been a longstanding issue. The NCAA has provided athletics departments with guidance through its Policy on Campus Sexual Violence (2021), but practitioners tasked with implementing Title IX and preventing sexual violence and educating stakeholders on these areas still encounter many obstacles related to training and compliance. However, practitioners have also developed strategies to tackle these obstacles. Thus, the purpose of this study was to interview practitioners working at the nexus of intercollegiate athletics and Title IX (n = 15) to uncover challenges related to sexual violence prevention and education and ways these leaders chose to address said challenges. Through a conceptual combination of bottom-up policy implementation and procedural justice, three challenges and associated best practices emerged from participants’ interviews. The first challenge was (1a) a resistance to sexual violence education from stakeholders which was addressed by the best practice of (1b) creating a community mindset. The second challenge was (2a) an emphasis on external image by the institution/athletics departments, with the best practice being (2b) proactive stakeholder participation. The third challenge participants discussed was (3a) information gatekeeping which was broken down by establishing the best practice of (3b) a scaffold of trust and communication between Title IX officials and athletics. Recommendations for practitioners are provided.

The Stadium as a Political Space

Luisa Turbino Torres
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Latin American countries have a strong soccer culture that is an undeniable part of their social, cultural, and political life. The region is also surrounded by social, political, economic, and many other conflicts, so I explore how soccer functions as a mirror to society and all these conflicts. With its ability to mobilize people, soccer is also a space for political resistance. Recently, there have been different fan groups organizing around soccer to challenge the discriminatory, excluding, and oppressive behaviors that were understood to be part of the soccer culture in different countries in Latin America. These fandom groups are a spontaneous articulation of fans that aims to create a comprehensive social-political debate around gender and sexuality in soccer. This paper looks at transnational soccer fandom activism, focusing on feminist groups (coletivos feministas) emerging around soccer in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, that engage in feminist activism and have been challenging masculine dominance in different ways. I explore how women are able to mobilize around soccer and incorporate a feminist analysis into their practice of social change, particularly looking at how they are connected to one another. I use interpretivist methodologies and ethnographic methods to understand how these groups are re-imagining a political space (soccer) and their relevance in the current political context. Results suggest that these feminist collectives seek to overturn political, social, and economic structures while trying to establish an emancipatory vision of society.

Asking Athletes - Exploring the Types of Questions Asked in Sports Press Conferences

Vincent Peña
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Sports press conferences are an understudied site for exploring the relationship between sports journalists and athletes. This study seeks to create a typology for the types of questions sports journalists ask in U.S. college sports press conferences as well as explore the differences that exist in questions based on the athlete. This study focuses on four major college football programs and examines the pre- and post-game press conferences for each for an entire season. The study examines these press conferences (n=44) to identity and categorize the types of questions the sports journalists ask athletes. In addition to looking at question topic, this study also seeks to explore whether the type of questions asked differ for players based on race or position. This author coded the questions into broad categories based on the topic, which resulted in the development of 11 specific topics divided into three groups: questions concerning physical aspects of the sport, mental aspects of the sport, and a miscellaneous category for personal or otherwise off-topic questions not related to the sport. This study creates a typology for question topics in sports press conferences. The findings suggest that significant statistical differences exist between the types of questions journalists ask to college football players based on their race or position. This research extends previous scholarship on questioning practices in journalism by focusing on sports and exploring how journalists might ask different questions based on identity of the source.

An Ice Hockey-Based Linguistic Persona

Andrew Bray
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

In this paper, I argue that American-born ice hockey players produce tokens of hockey with a vowel distinct from the Low Back vowels BOT and BOUGHT. This paper argues that players do not adhere to the expected categorization but rather have established a novel third vowel produced lower in the vowel space than either BOT or BOUGHT. This vowel, reserved only for hockey tokens, henceforth HOCKEY, functions as an emerging third-order index (Silverstein, 2003) of players’ speech and therefore is indicative of a hockey-based linguistic persona easily identifiable to others in the community. Data from 20 sociolinguistic interviews with players from the American Hockey League and ECHL are included in this analysis. Interviews were transcribed, aligned with corresponding WAV files, and then uploaded to the Dartmouth Linguistic Automation (Reddy and Stanford, 2015) for forced alignment and extraction of acoustic vowel data. Formant values, sound wave frequencies heightened by the positioning of the tongue, were measured at five percentages of duration. Data was Lobanov-normalized following the Nearey (1977) formula. Mean formant values for each player were calculated and MANOVA tests were used to establish Pillai scores measuring the degree of overlap between HOCKEY-BOT and BOT-BOUGHT. Lower Pillai scores were indicative of more merged vowels. The results demonstrated that these players produced a HOCKEY vowel either entirely distinct from, or minimally merged with BOT. I argue this HOCKEY vowel functions as an emerging third-order index of an American hockey-based persona due to its uniformity and multiple players’ metalinguistic knowledge of this variation.

Young Ethnic Women's Dropout of Organized Sport in Denmark

Allai Abou Chaker
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Young Danish women with ethnic minority background have a significantly higher dropout rate from sports participation than their Danish peers. Across racial and ethnic groups, young women from non-western countries have the highest dropout rates in youth sports, while studies also show that this group is less physically active when compared to their Danish counterparts and ethnic minority males. They also show an inverse relationship between the women’s age and their sport participation – when they enter puberty dropout rates increase dramatically. Therefore it is important to investigate whether honor-based social control in ethnic groups in Denmark influence young ethnic women’s decisions regarding membership and participation in Danish sports clubs and identify the cultural and religious values, which may influence the dropout rate. The study is based on interviews with parents of two groups of young ethnic women with a Muslim background. One group consists of 5-7 sets of parents to girls and young women who stopped playing sports around the onset of puberty. The other consists of 5-7 sets of parents to girls and young women who continued playing sports after the onset of puberty. Some of implications are: language barrieres (Danish, English and Arabic), Insider vs. Outsider, different limitations in the project.

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