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The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework of continued settler colonialism. The main catalyst for this development was sport-related gentrification: a new, publicly financed ice hockey arena for the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers, and a surrounding sport and entertainment district. This two-year ethnography explores this territory, in particular the changing interactions between preexisting, less affluent city-center residents and police, private security, crisis workers, and hockey fans. It reveals how residents navigate the physical and spatial changes to a downtown that are not only structured by revanchism, but by what Rai Reece calls “carceral redlining,” or the continuation of White supremacy through regulation, surveillance, displacement, and dispossession.

This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produced an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor within and through a weekly sport-for-development program in the distinct settler-colonial context of Edmonton, Alberta. For over two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban ‘underclass’, one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three-years of ethnographic field notes and interviews with ten men aged 25–42 years, our analysis revealed how these weekly sporting interludes served as convivial, safe, and consistent events that nurtured the development of long-term meaningful relationships with other participants and social workers, as well as a genuine sense of community. The weekly floor hockey matches were, thus, powerful sites in the broader struggle for what David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993) have called “salvaging the self” for men who embodied a repertoire of trauma and who are regularly positioned as morally devalued subjects who lacked personal responsibility and self-governance.

Convergent evolution is observed broadly across the web of life, but the degree of evolutionary constraint during adaptation of core intracellular processes is not known. High constraint has been assumed for conserved processes, such as cell division and DNA repair, but reports of nimble evolutionary shifts in these processes have confounded this expectation. Whole genome duplication (WGD) necessitates the concerted adjustment of a wide range of fundamental intracellular functions but nevertheless has been repeatedly survived in all kingdoms. Given this repeated adaptation to WGD despite obvious intracellular challenges to core processes such as meiosis, we asked: how do lineages not only survive WGD, but sometimes ultimately thrive? Are the solutions employed constrained or diverse? Here we detect genes and processes under selection following WGD in theCochleariaspecies complex by performing a scan for selective sweeps following WGD in a large-scale survey of 73 resequenced individuals from 23 populations across Europe. We then contrast our results from two independent WGDs inArabidopsis arenosaandCardamine amara.We find that while WGD does require the adaptation of particular functional processes in all three cases, the specific genes recruited to respond are highly flexible. We also observe evidence of varying degrees of convergence between different cases. Our results point to a polygenic basis for the distributed adaptive systems that control meiotic crossover number, ionomic rewiring, cell cycle control, and nuclear regulation. Given the sheer number of loci under selection post-WGD, we surmise that this polygenicity may explain the general lack of convergence between these species that are ~30 million years diverged. Based on our results, we speculate that adaptive processes themselves – such as the rate of generation of structural genomic variants—may be altered by WGD in nascent autopolyploids, contributing to the occasionally spectacular adaptability of autopolyploids observed across kingdoms.

This urban ethnography explores how a group of low-income (often homeless) men performed a range of masculinities through a sport-for-development program in the Western Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta. For more than two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban “underclass,” one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork, our intersectional analysis examines both the adaptive qualities of various classed and racialized masculinities and demonstrates the “symbolic violence” associated with their performance in the distinctive settler–colonial context of Edmonton’s inner city. Finally, we examine how these weekly sporting interludes also provided opportunities for more caring versions of masculinity and for more enduring forms of solidarity, support, and community to be enacted and experienced.

Generic qualitative design. To explore how Chinese adults living with spinal cord injury (SCI) viewed the prospect of inpatient peer support programs within a rehabilitation setting. Hospital in China. A purposive sample of adult inpatients with SCI (N = 6) currently undergoing rehabilitation was recruited. Each participant was interviewed twice. Twelve interview transcripts were analyzed using a thematic method. Five higher-order themes were developed. First, participants had unique backgrounds and personal lives before and after their SCI and reported frustrations about their lives resulting from their SCI. Second, participants reported varying degrees of satisfaction with their rehabilitation and identified the facilitators and barriers to their rehabilitation. Third, their perspectives on peer support were shaped by their rehabilitation goals. For example, participants who solely focused on the recovery of physical functioning noted that peers could help to supplement existing rehabilitation programming by guiding their rehabilitation exercises. Participants who concentrated on their future lives believed peers could teach them new skills to facilitate their integration in the community. However, some participants felt they could not trust peers’ advice because peers are not healthcare providers. Fourth, peer support delivery options varied from online chat groups (i.e., WeChat), in-person conversations, and mentoring lectures. Finally, anticipated outcomes were related to obtaining practical and emotional support from peers, being motivated, and feeling understood. Participants harbored mixed views on potential use-value and necessity of hospital-based peer support programs, which could inform future utilization of SCI peer support within Chinese hospitals.

Background Individuals living with a physical disability have reported difficulty in meeting their healthy living and leisure needs which could be a result of poor accessibility. Objective This qualitative study aimed to understand the relative accessibility of physical activity from the perspective of individuals living with a physical disability in Quebec, Canada. Methods Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with current, past, non-members, and staff members of an adapted physical activity program. A qualitative approach with an inductive thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. Results We identified five overarching themes focusing on participants’ experiences related to access: (i) physical activity opportunities; (ii) social interactions; (iii) relationships; (iv) infrastructure; (v) policies and public services. Participants highlighted that access to physical activity programming is shaped by a complex interaction of these overarching themes and their sub-themes. Conclusions Access to physical activity opportunities for individuals living with a physical disability cannot be understood in isolation from the broader public policies, infrastructure, social interactions, and relationships that shape their experiences. Policy makers and other health and recreational professionals must consider these broader factors when recommending or creating physical activity opportunities for individuals with physical disabilities.

As a result of a rapidly changing global political economy, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism, a new form of racialized urban poverty has become concentrated in the inner cities of innumerable North American urban centers. In response to these material conditions, various nonprofit organizations, corporate-sponsored initiatives,and underfunded municipal recreation departments continue to provide a range of sport-for-development programs for the ‘urban outcasts’ of the global economy. While sport scholars have widely critiqued these initiatives, little is known about how people experience these programs against the backdrop of actually existing neoliberalism (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) and the new conditions of urban poverty. As part of a three-year urban ethnography in Edmonton, Alberta, this paper examines how a group of less affluent and often homeless young men experienced and made use of a weekly, publicly funded floor-hockey program. In so doing, we explore how this sport-for-development program existed as a ‘hub’ within a network of social solidarity and as a crucial site for marginalized individuals to negotiate, and, at times, resist conditions of precarious labor in a divided Western Canadian city.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of a sport program in the lives of homeless men with severe mental illnesses and addictions. Interviews were conducted with eight men who attended a floor hockey program, and data examined using categorical-content narrative methodology. Five themes captured the role of the floor hockey program in the men’s lives: (a) relationships with program leader, (b) therapy, (c) community, (d) action, and (e) achievement. These themes were interpreted using theories of masculinity (Connell, 1995; Gough, 2014). Relationships with the program leader and other men, and ways in which they were allowed to play with physicality, provided opportunities to accumulate masculine capital (i.e., ways in which competence in traditionally masculine behaviors provides masculine credit). Practically, the findings suggest that sport program delivery for men such as those in this study can be enhanced by providing opportunities for accruing masculine capital.

In this article, we follow the recent calls of “sport and physical cultural studies” scholars to revisit the significance of the embodied research process and, in particular, the lived social body of the qualitative researcher. Between 2011 and 2013, we conducted a critical ethnography of the experiences of less affluent (and often homeless) young men at publicly subsidized weekly floor hockey games in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Our analysis focuses on three vignettes drawn from detailed field notes and ongoing interviews to reveal the researchers’ embodied investments in race, gender, and class politics; our coming to terms with these investments as they intersected, and clashed, with the bodies and agendas of the city’s “urban outcasts”; and, finally, the importance of interpreting these experiences with sensitivity to the context and community within which we, as critical ethnographers, coexist and, through our words and actions, help to (re)create.

This article examines the articulation of a racialized moral panic surrounding Aboriginal gang violence and the community of Maskwacis, a collection of four First Nations in central Alberta, Canada formerly known as Hobbema. Our analysis is situated within the distinctive settler-colonial context through which Aboriginal gangs were mediated (Ginsburg 1991) by the mainstream commercial media as an issue of public concern in this particular Cree community and, indeed, throughout Western Canada. Drawing upon interviews with journalists, First Nation residents, and other community members in the region, our analysis focuses on two interrelated issues: 1) the “behind-the-scenes” production processes through which non-Aboriginal journalists condensed themes of race, crime, and youth to reproduce and amplify a powerful and punitive discourse that articulated Aboriginal gang violence with the broader community itself; and 2) the ways in which First Nations residents and community members—themselves the subjects of the media gaze—interpreted, internalized, and, at times actively manipulated this racialized discourse of crisis.

If sport scholars are going to contribute to a critical (inter)national dialogue that challenges “official versions” of a post-9/11 geo-political reality, there is a need to continue to move beyond the borders of the US, and examine how nationalistic sporting spectacles work to promote local military initiatives that are aligned with the imperatives of neoliberal empire. In this article we provide a critical reading of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nationally-televised broadcast of a National Hockey League game, colloquially known as Tickets for Troops. We reveal how interest groups emphasized three interrelated narratives that worked to: 1) personalize the Canadian Forces and understandings of neoliberal citizenship, 2) articulate warfare/military training with men’s ice hockey in relation to various promotional mandates, and 3) optimistically promote the war in Afghanistan and the Conservative Party of Canada via storied national traditions and mythologies.

Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine issues surrounding the provision of sport opportunities to young men from inner-city areas of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. More specifically, the research question was: What are the benefits, constraints, and opportunities associated with providing sport programs to young men from inner-city areas? Design Ethnography. Methods Data were collected via 15 months of participant observation and interviews with 12 youth workers who were responsible for the provision of various sport programs to young inner-city dwellers. Analysis was framed around personal, social, and structural issues. Results At a personal level sport provided young men with an outlet for overcoming boredom and a temporary reprieve from the conditions of their daily lives. At a social level sport provided opportunities for relationship building between the youth workers and the young men. However, enduring structural constraints associated with economic and social inequality and the lack of a coordinated approach to the delivery of services restricted the influence that sport could have in the lives of the young men. Conclusion This study provided some precise understandings of the benefits, constraints, and opportunities associated with providing sport programs to members of specific populations in certain inner-city circumstances. Findings, therefore, have the potential to inform public health policy concerning the use of sport-for-development programming in such contexts.