Journal of Sport and Social Issues

This study uses life story interviews to understand the utility of Black Girls Run!—a predominantly Black organization for women who engage in recreational distance running. Drawing from Neckerman, Carter, and Lee’s conceptual framework of the minority culture of mobility, the author suggests that Black Girls Run! serves the purpose of helping its members confront the challenges and repercussions associated with being a racial minority in a majority White space, particularly as they are experienced by middle-class Black women. The author focuses on how the organization (a) allows its members to run with others who look like them, (b) cultivates social connection and community, and (c) facilitates challenging health statistics and shifting dominant narratives about Black women. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the latent functions of recreational sporting organizations catered to middle-class people of color.

As one of the most widely celebrated documentaries about female athletes to date, The Heart of the Game remains an important text to examine for the ways it represents female athletic experience and encourages audiences to consider gender issues in sport. Such an investigation is particularly apt, given how sports documentaries authenticate particular viewpoints while being understood by audiences as historical reflections of reality. Although the film is praiseworthy for exposing the cultural construction of gender as well as some ways gender ideologies hamper female athletic success, this essay argues that The Heart of the Game’s progressive agenda is ultimately undercut by its simultaneous reproduction of gender and racial ideologies that actually marginalize women and girls in sport.

Migration is a crucial topic for athletic career development. Despite the challenges and issues that sport migrants face, little is known about Brazilian context. On Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach, this study aims to analyze the Brazilian men elite futsal players’ job conditions and their influence on athletes’ dispositions for labor sport migration. On quali–quantitative approach, interviews with 28 Brazilian men elite futsal players were thematically analyzed and quantitative data on clubs’ rosters from the Brazilian National Futsal League were collected. We concluded the following aspects: (a) players’ migrant disposition is a consequence of unfavorable labor conditions; (b) remaining in the same city for long period is a privilege; (c) players and relatives are submitted to constant habitus transformation because of repeated mobility and adaptations to different networks in each new city/club.