Studies that have engaged parasport broadcasting, particularly through a narrative lens, have almost exclusively relied on textual and/or content analysis of the Paralympic Games as the source of cultural critique. We know far less about the decisions taken inside Paralympic broadcasters that have led to such representations. In this study – based on interviews with senior production and promotion staff at the United Kingdom’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we provide the first detailed examination of mediated parasport from this vantage point. We explore the use of promotional devices such as athletes’ backstories – the ‘Hollywood treatment’ – to both hook audiences and serve as a vehicle for achieving its social enterprise mandate to change public attitudes towards disability. In so doing, we reveal myriad tensions that coalesce around representing the Paralympics, with respect to the efforts made to balance the competing goals of key stakeholders and a stated desire to make the Paralympics both a commercial and socially progressive success.

The relationship between media, sport, nations and nationalism is well established, yet, there is an absence of these discussions at the intersection of communication, Paralympics and disability studies. This omission is particularly significant considering the rapid commodification of the Paralympic spectacle, exacerbated by the entry of Channel 4 (C4) as the UK Paralympic rights holders, that has seen the games become an important site of disability (re-)presentation. In this article, we focus on the construction of national, normative, disabled bodies in Paralympic representation drawn from an analysis of three integrated datasets from Channel 4's broadcasting of the Rio 2016 Paralympics: interviews with C4 production and editorial staff; quantitative content analysis, and qualitative moving image analysis. We highlight the strategic approach taken by C4 to focus on successful medal winning athletes; the implications this has on the sports and disability classifications given media coverage; and the role of affective high-value production practices. We also reveal the commercial tensions and editorial decisions that broadcasters face with respect to which disabilities / bodies are made hyper-visible-and thereby those which are marginalized-as national disability sport icons that inculcate preferred notions of disability and the (re)imagined nation. 'hyper-visibility' of disability (Pullen et al., 2018), our focus herein is on the media's role in the social construction of disability and the production of Paralympic media texts as those through which political/ national discourse can be traced (Whannel, 2013). Critically engaging with representations of disability and disabled Paralympic bodies raises important questions, especially when held relational to a celebrated and 'normative' national body politic, one derived and cultivated from enhanced forms of neoliberal embodiment (sculpted, healthy, fit, sexual, heteronormative, and attractive) (Turner, 1996). With death, age and disability often positioned as the antithesis to such a normative body politic, media depictions of disability have, for the most part, drawn on a limited number of stereotypes, including: helpless, passive victims; vulnerable and pitiable and childlike dependents; and 'supercrips' predicated on inspirational stories of determination and personal courage to overcome adversity (Barnes & Mercer, 2010). Yet, the hyper-visibility and celebration of disability in and through the Paralympics that intends to provide a global sporting spectacle for the empowerment of disabled people for a more equitable society (See, Howe, 2008) could challenge such dominant narratives. In this paper, our interests centre on the very particular and specific construction of national, normative, disabled bodies in, and through, Paralympic representations. Building upon extant media and disability scholarship, we draw on three integrated datasets (interviews with production and editorial staff, quantitative content analysis, and qualitative moving image analysis) t...

Despite the successful transition of the Paralympics from relative obscurity to global mega-event, we still know little about how it is consumed by audiences. Using a methodological approach that draws on survey ( n = 2008) and focus group ( n = 216) data from Paralympic audiences across the UK, this study provides the first mixed method and integrated empirical analysis of Paralympic audiences to date. We attempt to identify who the UK Paralympic audience is, before examining audience perceptions of Paralympic coverage, and the impact of watching the Paralympics on audience sentiments toward disabled people in sporting and everyday contexts.

The Exercise is Medicine movement, centralised in Physical Activity Health Promotion (PAHP) policy, is illustrative of neoliberal health governance that acts to sustain the population's regular participation in physical activity (PA) through the logics of self-care, productivity, personal responsibility and choice. One way this is propagated is through the promotion of exercise as the 'best buy' (AMRC 2015) in modern medicine and a wonder 'pill' to good health (Sallis, 2009). However, the increasing reliance of PAHP policy on the Exercise is Medicine narrative to construct the healthy citizen typically conflates the categories of sport, exercise and PA, and fails to recognise the different social relations and risks each entails. Consequently the neoliberal logics central to this narrative are more likely to create actors inclined towards competitive sport and, therefore, PAHP places populations at risk of physical injury that entail both social and economic costs. Mobilising data from semi-structured interviews, the social and economic 'costs' of physical injury are documented to develop a critical evaluation of the paradoxical implications of these 'costs' for contemporary public health promotion such as the Exercise is Medicine movement.

The Paralympic games is a pedagogic pervasive, political, powerful, and 'popular' cultural site where the heightened visibility of disability bring into being specific forms of disability as they articulate within cultures, institutions and practices. Regarded as a 'positive charge' by Stuart Hall, the Paralympics intends to challenge the devalued disabled body politic of typical disability representation. This has been stimulated by the entry of Channel 4 as the UK Paralympic rights holders in 2012 which has seen greater media coverage of certain technologically enhanced cyborgian parasport bodies and an emerging celebrity / sexualised disability culture. This contemporary moment in disability representation provides a compelling space in which to (re-)address the gendered nature of hyper-visible Parasport hybrids, their potential to disrupt 'normative' relations of power, and, the wider impact on disability politics in a neoliberalised culture of widening and affective circuits of bodily inclusion and control. Drawing on an integrated content and textual analysis of 90 hours of Paralympic programming from the Rio 2016 Games we highlight two emblematic segments so as to enhance our appreciation of contemporary disabled politics as it intersects with gender, technology and nation. We analyse these emblematic segments at the intersection of critical disability studies, cultural studies and sport, using Mitchell and Snyder's (2015) concept of ablenationalism to highlight the extent certain technological capacitated parasport bodies perform gendered representational work as part of the seductive apparatus of neoliberal micro-governance suggestive of an emerging ecology of disability-gender relations. In doing so, we highlight the Paralympic contradictions and interrogate the assumed 'positive charge' of the contemporary (re-)presentation of disability.