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There are systemic and longstanding inequalities in sport participation for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) migrants. Drawing on theoretical foundations of critical pedagogy and social justice education, as well as a public sociology perspective, this paper examines the development of an action research (AR) project to support the co-creation of inclusive climates in sports clubs in CALD communities in Melbourne, Australia. We use artefacts from collaborative sessions, interviews, and surveys to analyse the AR's impact on participating community sport leaders' awareness and practice. The findings indicate how the collaborative process of assessing clubs' diversity and inclusion climates affected participants' awareness of inequities and exclusionary practices, and how the co-creation of strategies for change brought together diverse perspectives. We reflect on the implications and limitations of the AR for research practice aimed at promoting equitable social inclusion for CALD migrants in community sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has examined how sports events and sport-for-development projects can create, sustain, and maximize positive social impacts for local communities. This article takes this debate forward by arguing that the cultivation of safe space is a key ingredient of sport-for-development management and community event leverage. Safe space is conceptualized as a multidimensional process that involves physical, psychological/ affective, sociocultural, political, and experimental dimensions. Drawing on empirical findings from Sri Lanka, Israel, and Brazil, the article shows how these dimensions of safe space operate and interact in practice, and identifies practical strategies that sport managers, policymakers, and practitioners can use to cultivate safe spaces in and through sports projects and events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health policy and interventions seek to arrest declining physical activity rates in childhood. Two prominent settings for intervening in childhood physical activity are schools and the home. This paper critically examines how these two spaces are constructed in a way that leads to different physical activity outcomes for children in their early primary years. We draw on child-centred ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a cohort of Year 1/2 (5–8 years) students in a public primary school in Australia over a six-month period, and as well as on Bourdieusean concepts of field, capital, and habitus. The results show that many participants perceived the home to be a much safer environment for physical self-expression compared to physical education and the school playground. The way these spaces are constructed leads to the privileging of certain physical activity habitus (PAH), while some children must manage a divided habitus across these settings, which can increasingly create internal tensions over time. We conclude with a call to utilise theoretically informed approaches to better understand the complex processes occurring across the spaces, and to utilise this insight to develop more nuanced efforts to engage children in physical activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features public policy recommendations to boost use of research evidence in public health practice in 2023. Topics discussed include the need to fund priority areas that promote long-term collaborative research for the use of practitioners and decision makers, and the need to recognize and reward the application of research designs conducive to the production of high quality research evidence. Also noted is the need to fund the dissemination of research findings.

This paper critically examines football (soccer) fandom as an important yet under-explored site for the production of new understandings of multiculturalism and cultural hybridisation. Building on the analytical framework of everyday multiculturalism, we report on ethnographic research undertaken with football fans in Western Sydney, Australia, to analyse the interactions and conflicts between football fans and authorities that surrounded the 2014 Harmony Day celebrations. This paper argues that across the fabric of professional football in Australia, multiculturalism is lived in conflicting ways. It is shown that despite attempts by stakeholders of the game to promote a mainstream ‘family-friendly’ form of fandom, Western Sydney football fans create new forms of cross-cultural conviviality through their fandom practices that not only reshape their own identities but also challenge the country’s official, governmental discourse of multiculturalism and its attendant policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction for the journal is presented which examines the theory-practice connection of sports with regards to social change outcomes

This article reports on a mixed-methods study of social exclusion experiences among 233 resettled refugees living in urban and regional Queensland, Australia. The findings reported here are drawn from the SettleMEN project, a longitudinal investigation of health and settlement experiences among recently arrived adult men from refugee backgrounds conducted between 2008 and 2010. Using questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews, we examine four key dimensions of social exclusion: production, consumption, social relations, and services. We show that, overall, participants experienced high levels of social exclusion across all four dimensions. Participants living in regional areas were significantly more likely to be excluded from production, social relations, and services. We argue that there is a pressing need to tackle barriers to economic participation and discrimination in order to promote the social inclusion of men from refugee backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal sport is a growth area of sport participation but there has been limited examination of how informal and unstructured forms of participation may contribute to health outcomes that are important for public health. This article aims to address the current lack of data examining the health outcomes associated with informal sport participation and consider the potential role of informal sport within efforts to promote healthier communities through sport. The article seeks to broaden understanding of how informal sport participation can contribute to health outcomes, particularly with regard to increasing physical activity and enhancing mental health and social connection. The article discusses the findings of an Australian mixed-method study that draws on observation, survey, interview and focus group data to examine the prospective health and social benefits of informal sport participation for adults. The findings demonstrate that informal sport participation can contribute to physical and mental health outcomes and facilitate social connection. Analysis of the observation data enabled an examination of the economic value of informal sport in relation to the health benefits it affords. The study provides valuable evidence of the value of informal sport for enhancing community health and broadens understanding of how sport can be utilized as a health promotion resource. The article concludes by suggesting that through leveraging existing infrastructure and the self-organizing aspects of informal sport, local government and health stakeholders can harness its potential to improve public health outcomes and address health inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pedagogy of an urban Sport for Development (SfD) initiative in Belgium through the voices of young people. We draw on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and use qualitative research methods (i.e. observations, informal conversations, in-depth interviews and sharing circles) over a three-year period, to analyse the initiative's actual pedagogical practice with key Freirean concepts (i.e. 'banking education', 'dialogue' and 'dialogical action') and virtues (e.g. respect for people's knowledge, rejection of discrimination, caring for people). The findings reveal the presence of several Freirean virtues, emerging dialogue and, for some, action thought. Still, the SfD initiative remains at considerable distance from fully-fledged critical pedagogy. The young people in the SfD initiative nonetheless experience it as a space where they can be themselves, feel at home, gain respect, can learn to reflect and form opinions, and are temporarily freed from daily struggles such as discrimination. We discuss several pathways that could foster the capacity to organise and deliver a programme beyond emerging dialogue and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood sport participation is associated with physical, social, and mental health benefits, which are more likely to be realized if the sport environment is safe. However, our understanding of children's experience of psychological, physical, and sexual violence in community sport in Australia is limited. The aims of this study were to provide preliminary evidence on the extent of experiences of violence during childhood participation in Australian community sport and to identify common perpetrators of and risk factors for violence. The Violence Towards Athletes Questionnaire (VTAQ) was administered online to a convenience sample of Australian adults (>18 years), retrospectively reporting experiences of violence during childhood community sport. Frequencies of experience of violence were calculated and Chi-square tests were conducted to determine differences between genders. In total, there were 886 respondents included in the analysis. Most survey respondents were women (63%) and about a third were men (35%). About 82% of respondents experienced violence in sport as a child. Psychological violence was most prevalent (76%), followed by physical (66%) and sexual (38%) violence. Peers perpetrated the highest rates of psychological violence (69%), and the rates of physical and psychological violence by coaches (both >50%) were also high. Age, sexual orientation, disability, and hours of weekly sport participation as a child were all associated with childhood experience of violence in sport. The rates of interpersonal violence against children in sport were high. This novel data on perpetrators of the violence and the risk factors for experiencing violence provides further context to inform safeguarding strategies in sport. A national prevalence study is recommended to advance our understanding of the childhood experiences of violence in Australian sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in Australian club-based sport has either plateaued or declined across a broad array of sports over the last 20 years. In contrast, participation in informal forms of sport has increased across the time. Despite the increasing popularity of informal sport, this form of participation continues to lack recognition as a legitimate and valuable avenue for population-wide sport participation. This article focuses on examining the spatial exclusion of informal sport within community sport systems. Theoretically informed by concepts of spatial justice and Lefebvre’s theories of spatial production this article utilises the perspective of multiple stakeholders and a multi-level policy analysis to demonstrate the current spatial injustice that manifests within policy, planning, and use of public spaces and the significant constraints consequently arising for communities wishing to participate in informal sport. We argue that the marginalisation of informal sport is at odds with Australian policy agendas that emphasise an urgent need to increase population levels of physical activity. The article concludes that action to counter spatial injustice within community sport is essential to capitalise on the opportunities that informal participation presents to address key health and social policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians, scholars, and practitioners have drawn attention to social and health benefits of sport participation in the context of forced migration and refugee settlement. This study aims to progress conceptual and practical understandings of how asylum seekers' past and present experiences shape their sport participation. We present an instrumental case study drawn from the Movi Kune programme to discuss the experiences of an asylum seeker holistically, in a particular context in time and space. The findings illustrate how pre-migration, migratory, and present experiences of living in prolonged uncertainty and liminality all strongly affect sport participation and its health and integration outcomes. The results further show that sport participation was an opportunity to perform agency, experience mastery, coping, and social recognition, promoting positive self-efficacy beliefs, health and social connection over time. Our findings extend the literature by indicating that sport practices can enhance human agency to cope with health issues and distressing past and present experiences during the asylum-seeking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Contemporary issues in crowd safety research and practice are delineated. • The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety is introduced and its layers are explained. • Challenges of implementation and the overlook layers of this model are discussed. • A call is made to set a global Vision Zero target in crowd safety. • Avenues of furthering stakeholder collaboration in crowd safety are discussed. Crowds can be subject to intrinsic and extrinsic sources of risk, and previous records have shown that, in the absence of adequate safety measures, these sources of risk can jeopardise human lives. To mitigate these risks, we propose that implementation of multiple layers of safety measures for crowds—what we label The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety —should become the norm for crowd safety practice. Such system incorporates a multitude of safety protection layers including regulations and policymaking, planning and risk assessment, operational control, community preparedness, and incident response. The underlying premise of such model is that when one (or multiple) layer(s) of safety protection fail(s), the other layer(s) can still prevent an accident. In practice, such model requires a more effective implementation of technology, which can enable provision of real-time data, improved communication and coordination, and efficient incident response. Moreover, implementation of this model necessitates more attention to the overlooked role of public education, awareness raising, and promoting crowd safety culture at broad community levels, as one of last lines of defence against catastrophic outcomes for crowds. Widespread safety culture and awareness has the potential to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills that can prevent such outcomes or mitigate their impacts, when all other (exogenous) layers of protection (such as planning and operational control) fail. This requires safety campaigns and development of widespread educational programs. We conclude that, there is no panacea solution to the crowd safety problem, but a holistic multi-layered safety system that utilises active participation of all potential stakeholders can significantly reduce the likelihood of disastrous accidents. At a global level, we need to target a Vision Zero of Crowd Safety , i.e., set a global initiative of bringing deaths and severe injuries in crowded spaces to zero by a set year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]