Assessing the sociology of sport: On sport participation and disabilities in France

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Stéphane Héas, a leading French scholar on sport participation and the rights and opportunities of people with disabilities and minorities to engage in sporting activity, considers the trajectory and challenges of sociology of sport in France with special reference to the needs of these populations. It is noted that while studies of sport and physical activity that engaged "a sociological gaze" were relatively late in coming to France, research engaging socio-cultural understandings of sport has accelerated in recent years.A key challenge to research in this area has been to redress the relative neglect of studying the opportunities and participation of people with disabilities and other minorities in sport and physical activity. In the future, the sociology of sport holds the promise of being able to support meaningful policy changes to enable equity and opportunity for these populations. Reflections on the trajectory of the sociology of sportBefore the 1980s, and even moving into the 1990s, the sociology of sport in France was characterized by meagre and chequered development. Nevertheless, an area of research emerged within sport and physical education (in French: Education Physique et Sportive, E.P.S.), a disciplinary area that had become required in private and public school education in France.Research in this developing field was of at least two minds. On one hand, it was radical in its criticism of sport, and on the other, it was also apologetic. Radical critics were concerned about the increasing capitalistic tendencies of society and the pressures of instrumentalization on human agency (Brohm, 1993; Brohm, 1996). Indeed, much work

‘Everybody with Disability Should be Included’: A Qualitative Interview Study of Athletes’ Experiences of Disability Sports Participation Analysed with Ideas of Able-Mindedness

“…Disability sports were developed based on the ideals of equal, democratic rights to participation (Valet 2018), and many disability sports organisations, such as the Special Olympics and Paralympics, work to facilitate participation (Hassan, McConkey & Dowling 2014). Yet, participation in disability sports can be constrained or belittled by institutional power relations and hegemonic views of the body and mind (Héas 2015), and Smith et al (2015) found that participation in disability sports can ameliorate experiences of stigmatisation due to the normalising assumptions of able-mindedness. Thus, in public discourse, there is a prevalent sports-disability binary, one that both draws upon and reinforces a predominant therapeutic and rehabilitative view of disability sports (Rees, Robinson & Shields 2017).…”

“…In addition, Pack, Kelly and Arvinen-Barrow (2017) and Smith et al (2015) showed that an athletic identity is pervasive and creates positive impressions, regardless of disability or ability, and can help overcome disablist attitudes (Guerrero & Martin 2018). On the other hand, sports targeting people with ID can reinforce social exclusion and perpetuate able-minded norms (Héas 2015;McConkey et al 2013). Exclusion from sports activities can be derived from stigmatisation and the labelling of ID as deviant; thus, some athletic achievements can be viewed as abnormal, while others are considered the norm and desirable (Schalk 2016;Wendell 1989).…”