Catherine Palmer

University of Tasmania · School of Social Sciences

Despite stories about drinking being the focus of the research with young people, holiday makers, stag tour participants and college fraternities, stories of drinking among sportspeople have not featured significantly in the scholarship, even though alcohol consumption is a central feature in many aspects of sporting cultures and communities. Drawi...

There is a growing recognition of the ways in which sport and leisure can contribute to well-being. This paper offers a socio-cultural account of the sport-charity nexus as a site and source of community well-being. The paper conceives sports charity as broader than a fundraising imperative or a motivation for physical health outcomes and benefits...

In the 2016 International Olympic Committee Consensus Statement on harassment and abuse, it was outlined that psychological abuse in sport research has been heavily focused on the coach–athlete relationship resulting in a lack of research on other members of the athletes’ support system such as their ‘entourage.’ Researchers of abuse have further n...

Deliberations on methodology in qualitative research have typically offered guidance for increasing involvement by subjects or focus on the reasons why people choose not to take part in the research. This paper provides a different contribution to advancing knowledge and practice in qualitative methodologies. It examines the reasons why people choo...

Within the research on sport and social protest, there has been little consideration on the role celebrity foundations might play. Through an analysis of the charity foundations of three of the world’s richest and most popular sport stars globally – Roger Federer, David Beckham and Andre Agassi -, this paper maps the potential impacts of their foun...

This article offers a sociological account of the growth in popularity of mass participation sports-based charity challenges. It argues these events have emerged as unique social, health, and philanthropic phenomena in the context of healthism and neo-liberalism. Drawing on the concept of “embodied philanthropy,” the key argument is that “fitness p...

Over the past two decades the issue of gender imbalance in teaching has been the subject of media and political discussion. Researchers have yet to draw definitive conclusions as to the relationship between teacher gender and student achievement, but the notion that more men are needed in teaching persists, with calls for governments to enact ‘affi...

This paper reports on the experiences of male primary school teachers in regional Australia. Drawing on 53 open-ended survey responses and interviews undertaken with five male teachers in Tasmania, the paper analyses their perspectives of their work and roles, and the additional labour of ‘career identity work’ through sport. For the men in this st...

This article describes an emerging research agenda for defining the relationship between women, sport and alcohol as a feminist issue. Characterised as a “holy trinity”, the relationship between sport, drinking, particularly heavy drinking, and masculinity remains a popular orthodoxy. While not disputing the enduring and influential symbolic, econo...

This article examines the attempts to promote sport among Indonesian athletes during the 1950s. Drawing on archival and secondary sources from the period immediately after Independence, the article analyses the processes and practices through which ethnic Chinese athletes in Indonesia were positioned in opposition to the Indigenous athletes and pro...

Purpose To outline the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in debates about sport, alcohol, and addiction. It appears that a growing number of sportspeople suffer from addiction to alcohol and other drugs while at the same time alcohol use is widely sanctioned and celebrated in sport. The high-profile falls from grace are a public display of a mo...

This article explores the growing popularity of charity sporting events or ‘thons’ as an emergent fitness practice. To do this, I locate my analysis within a discussion of the emergent trend towards moving methods in sport and physical cultural studies research. Reflecting on some of the methodological challenges and theoretical conundrums that aro...

This chapter acknowledges the significant contributions of early action sport scholars, and their ongoing influence on current thinking about the experiences of women as participants. With their work spanning a number of sports, Becky Beal, Douglas Booth, Jason Laurendeau, Catherine Palmer, Robert Rinehart and Belinda Wheaton, were amongst those wh...

Accounts of drinking and drunken misadventures often feature in narratives surrounding sporting celebrities. Often framed as a ‘fall from grace’, such accounts tend to paint the athlete as a ‘fool or villain’. For some sportsmen and women, their fall from grace represents a high-profile, public display of a more insidious, problematic relationship...

This article offers a new approach for examining Muslim women in sport, which combines the domains of sporting participation, consumption and representation. It proposes moving beyond a sports development paradigm and deficit model of sports participation, whereby marginal communities are incorporated into the mainstream by playing sport, to take a...

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Catherine Palmer, a wide-ranging scholar of sporting subcultures, examines one of more intriguing artifacts of sport in contemporary times: the inevitability of controversies and scandals. Palmer notes that the controversies, scandals and crimes that have become a regular feature of sport represent ‘emp...

This introductory essay by Special Issue Editor, Catherine Palmer, introduces a double issue of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport focused on the contemporary agenda of research on alcohol within the field of sociology of sport. In introducing the articles in the special issue, Palmer considers the diverse intersectional concerns r...

This paper presents a series of emerging research avenues and agendas for under-represented aspects of sport-related drinking. Extending the findings of a previous paper, which mapped the dominant themes in sociological treatments of drinking and sport to date, this paper argues for the importance of widening the empirical and theoretical base so a...

This paper introduces an under-researched area in analyses of contemporary sporting practices: women and sport-related drinking. While the role that alcohol plays in creating particular cultural identities in sport has been well documented, this has been done, almost exclusively, in relation to men. Drawing on empirical research with female support...

Globalization is a key part of everyday lives, and sport itself is an increasingly global phenomenon. This book successfully brings the two together, locating the study of sports policy within a broader consideration of global processes, practices and consequences. Drawing upon a range of empirical case studies, Palmer successfully illuminates iss...

This article aims to apply a post-panoptic view of surveillance within the context of elite sport. Latour's (2005) 'oligopticon' and Deleuze and Guttari's (2003) 'rhizomatic' notion of surveillance networks are adopted to question the relevance and significance of Foucault's (1979) conceptualisation of surveillance within an elite sports academy se...

There is a common perception that football and alcohol go hand in hand and that players and fans routinely engage in excessive and irresponsible drinking. In Australia, this is manifest in the stereotypical ‘Pissed Aussie Rules fan’. Following research with Australian Rules football fans in South Australia, we identified three categories of fans ac...

This article synthesizes the main themes and research agendas that have been explored in studies of sports-associated drinking. It identifies four themes in which sport and alcohol come together: (a) the commercial economy; (b) social practices and cultural identities; (c) crime and violence; and (d) health behaviors. The article highlights the par...

This paper explores the ways in which the passage of the Tour de France bicycle race through France produces a distinctive cultural cartography or social map of France. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) conceptual triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, the paper argues that the Tour de France both represents and...

This article discusses some of the everyday risks and professional dilemmas encountered when conducting participant-observation based research into the use and meaning of alcohol among fans of Australian Rules football. The key risks and dilemmas were those that emerged from female researchers entering into a predominantly male football subculture...

This paper explores some of the ethnographic possibilities offered by the engagement of anthropologists in significant realms of global popular culture. It takes as its point of departure the increasing presence of mega-events on the landscape of contemporary social life. Specifically, the paper argues that mega-events, here exemplified by the Tour...

This study explores the ways in which a group of young Muslim refugee women in Adelaide, South Australia, draw upon their experiences of playing in a soccer team as a way of establishing and embellishing a particular cultural identity that both affirms and challenges many of the traditions of Islam. Based primarily on qualitative interviews with th...

This chapter explores some of the issues and challenges faced by a social researcher working in an Australian policy context. It is particularly concerned with the process and politics that underpinned an action research project conducted with a group of young Muslim, refugee women who play together in a ‘New Arrivals’ soccer team in Adelaide, Sout...

In this paper we report on a South Australian study of perceptions of safety and aspects of neighbourhood life including social capital which involved the analysis of 2400 self-completed questionnaires. A path analysis found that perceptions of safety were directly associated with gender, age, perceptions of neighbourhood pollution and neighbourhoo...

In this article we examine the cultural practices of a group of South Australian football supporters known as the "Grog Squad." While hard drinking is undeniably a central part of this group of exclusively male fans, being a "Groggie" is much more than just being in a boozy boys club. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken throughout the 2005...

In this paper we report on a South Australian study of perceptions of safety and aspects of neighbourhood life including social capital which involved the analysis of 2400 self-completed questionnaires. A path analysis found that perceptions of safety were directly associated with gender, age, perceptions of neighbourhood pollution and neighbourhoo...

This article examines some of the ways in which fear of crime impacts upon opportunities for social interaction among residents in stigmatised suburbs. As we explore in this article, neighbourhoods that are stigmatised by virtue of material disadvantage and poor reputations tend to be associated with a number of social problems, including higher ra...

Many poor suburbs in Australia with higher than average numbers of public housing tenants do not simply suffer material disadvantage but also suffer from poor reputations that are reinforced though stigmatising assumptions that portray their residents negatively. Preliminary findings from qualitative research undertaken in Adelaide, South Australia...

This paper presents data from 40 in-depth interviews that were conducted as part of a study of social capital and health in relation to people's perceptions of the influence of 'place' on their participation levels and health. These data were used to examine features of the western suburbs of Adelaide that were perceived as health damaging and heal...

This article details the particular commodification of those high-risk, highadrenalin activities known collectively as ‘extreme sports’. A variety of commercial operators now offer relative sporting neophytes the chance to take part in mountaineering, snow boarding or canyonning adventures that are billed as being ‘high thrill, low risk’. It is the...

Since its publication more than a decade ago, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has offered an enticing, if romantic, way of conceptualising nationalism. Fine-grained ethnographic analysis, however, of the ways in which local populations actually imagine their community raises some questions for the continuing viability of such a notion. In...

This article explores some of the methodological and ethical issues that arise when undertaking ethnographic research into the governing bodies of world sport. Drawing on the author's own attempts to penetrate the operations of La Société du Tour de France, this article presents two positions (i) that increasing attention should be paid to the role...

Community - is it in decline? Is society becoming less civil? Why are we now less trusting of public institutions? Is Australia's social capital eroding? And what, if anything, should and can be done about these matters through public policy? Increasingly in Australia, the answers to these questions are framed around the idea of social capital. Thi...