Special Issues

Academic research and writing can be a relatively isolating experience, developing new perspectives and arguments, balancing the empirical and the theoretical, justifying a methodology, and in terms of academic journals satisfying the always important and frequently demanding expectations of peer reviewers in your field(s). But it’s not always like this, and along the way I have personally benefited from participating in numerous collective initiatives as represented in Special Issues, and sometimes in dedicated sub-sections, of particular journals. Writing on sport and leisure from the point of view of socio-cultural history and sociology has been a pretty fruitful exercise in the cultivation of interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative research and writing. In such publications, it has been an exercise in confirming and reaffirming the importance of sport and leisure in selected historical and contemporary, socio-cultural and political, contexts and settings; so, at least from my point of view, giving credibility to what over the last few decades has become more acceptable as a serious focus of academic study, at regional, national and global levels.

In my case, an SI profile has been enabled by the generosity of professional bodies such as the British Sociological Association, the Leisure Studies Association, the British Society of Sports History, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, the North American Society for Sport History, and numerous professional bodies across Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, and by funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the British Academy. Conferences and workshops have helped refine arguments, debate interpretations and analyses, and prepare works for publications in a wide range of journals, including SIs on specific themes and topics and in thematised sub-sections of journals. Listed below are eleven SI journals that have welcomed such contributions, five journals for which I have contributed articles, followed by a selection of journal covers.

Special Issues (guest/contributing editor)

Sociology of Sport Journal: Special Theme Issue: British Cultural Studies, Volume 9 Number 2, June 1992, with John Hargreaves, Journal Editor Peter Donnelly.

Journal of Sport & Social Issues – Focus: Power/Resistance/Sport, Volume 22 Issue 3, August 1998, Journal Editor Toby Miller.

American Behavioral Scientist – Sport and Cultural Space, Volume 46 Number 11, July 2003, with Andrei Markovits and Christopher Young.

Journal of Sport & Social Issues: Special Issue: Sport Studies at the Chelsea School, Volume 31 Number 3, August 2007, with Jim McKay, Journal Editor Cheryl Cole.

Sport in History – The Aesthetics of Sport: Responses to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s ‘In Praise of Athletic Beauty’, Volume 28 Issue 1, 2008, with Christopher Young, Journal Editor-in-Chief Kay Schiller.

Journal of Sport History – Forum: Sport in Modern Europe, Volume 37 Number 1, Spring 2010, with Christopher Young, Journal Editors Wray Vamplew and Alison M. Wrynn.

Journal of Sport History – Forum: European Sport and the Challenges of Its Recent Historiography, Volume 38 Number 2, Summer 2011, with Christopher Young, Journal Editors Wray Vamplew and Alison M. Wrynn.

European Review – Focus: Sports: Towards a New History of European Sport, Volume 19 Number 4, October 2011, with Christopher Young, Journal Editor Theo D’Haen.

Journal of Historical Sociology: Special Issue: Sports and History, Volume 24 Issue 4, December 2011, with Christopher Young.

Contemporary Social Science – The Olympic Legacy, Volume 9 Number 2, June 2014, Journal Editor David Canter.

Annals of Leisure Research – Leisure For All, with Gökben Demirbas and Mark Turner, Summer 2024, Journal Editors Louise Mansfield and Belinda Wheaton.

Special Issues (contributor)

Other SIs to which I have contributed include Soccer and Society (2000); The International Journal of the History of Sport (1999); Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics (2014); Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research (1992); Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture (1999); and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2016).