Centre for Sport, Physical Activity and Health Equality (SPHERE) researchers are calling for a deeper questioning of how sport research is done and who it serves.

Across a series of recent publications, SPHERE researchers are calling for a deeper questioning of how sport research is done and who it serves.

Together, these contributions showcase a vibrant and evolving landscape of sport research; one that is imaginative, interdisciplinary, and deeply attuned to the complexities of gender. Through collective memory work, governance critique, decolonial praxis, fatherhood studies, and digital innovation, SPHERE researchers are expanding how we understand embodiment, care, and participation.

This work brings theory into practice. It designs inclusive tools, reframes injury and risk, and interrogates how gendered bodies are governed, represented, and supported. It foregrounds relationality, creativity, and lived experience, offering new ways to engage with sport and movement as sites of transformation.

By weaving together methodological experimentation and applied intervention, these projects help illuminate, and actively challenge, the gendered inequalities that persist in sport, education, and health. They offer not only insight, but momentum: toward more inclusive, responsive, and equitable futures.

Governing gender and rethinking risk

Dr Sheree Bekker’s recent co-authored article, Critical Reflections on the Governance of Women and Gender Expansive Athletes, interrogates how sport governance constructs and regulates gendered bodies. Framed as an intersectional, interdisciplinary dialogue, the piece challenges dominant narratives of fairness and safety, asking:

• Who defines risk, and under what assumptions?
• How do governance structures reproduce harm in the name of protection?
• What futures become possible when equity and complexity are centred?

Bekker’s broader research critiques biological determinism in sports medicine, highlighting how injury risk, such as women’s ACL tears, is shaped by social, cultural, and institutional forces. Her work calls for systems-oriented approaches that rethink athlete care through a feminist and justice-informed lens.

Fathering, sport, and shifting masculinities

Dr Luke Jones and Dr Harry Bowles forthcoming edited collection, Fathering and Sport: Contemporary Practice and Perspectives, opens a timely conversation about how sport and exercise cultures shape, and are shaped by, the lived experiences of fathers in the 21st century. Against a backdrop of shifting gender roles and neoliberal pressures toward self-actualisation, the book explores how fathering is performed, negotiated, and reimagined through sport.

Drawing on social theory and personal reflection, contributors examine:

• How sport mediates the everyday practices and identities of fathers
• What it means to father in increasingly complex and fluid family contexts
• How sport and exercise cultures offer both constraint and possibility in shaping masculinities

Despite sport’s centrality in many fathers’ lives, the socio-cultural dimensions of fathering through sport remain underexplored. This collection addresses that gap, offering nuanced insights into how sport intersects with care, identity, and relational labour in contemporary fatherhood.

Memory work and methodological possibility

Following a series of publications on gender and memory in sport, researchers Stephanie Merchant, Dr Jessica Francombe-Webb, and Dr Bryan Clift now turn their attention to the methodological innovation. Their forthcoming chapter, Towards a Post-Qualitative Informed Approach to Collective Memory Work, invites scholars to consider the challenges and possibilities of reimagining how memory, embodiment, and meaning-making unfold in research.

Rather than presenting Collective Memory Work (CMW) as a fixed or proven method, the authors explore its potential to unsettle conventional research relations, engage more-than-discursive dimensions of experience, and trouble static notions of identity and being. In doing so, they raise critical questions:

• How might memory writing become a site of collective reflection and feminist praxis?
• What does it mean to foreground affect, embodiment, and relationality in methodological design?
• Can post-qualitative inquiry accommodate the political and creative ethos of memory work?

This latest contribution is less a roadmap than an invitation: to rethink how we do research, what counts as knowledge, and how collective memory might help us imagine new futures in sport, education, and health.

Intersectional and decolonial wellbeing

SPHERE’s commitment to intersectional and decolonial research is reflected in the work of Dr Bonnie Pang and Dr Allison Jeffrey, who consider new approaches to thinking about wellbeing, embodiment, and care.

In a recent chapter, Decolonization in Sport](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1612-042-1)_ (Pang, Balram & Knijnik, 2024), Pang challenges Eurocentric frameworks by introducing an anthropocosmic approach, one that situates the body within interconnected social, ecological, and spiritual systems. This perspective invites researchers to move beyond Western dualisms and consider relationality as central to health and movement. Meanwhile Jeffrey’s feminist materialist scholarship explores ageing, recovery, and care through the lens of movement.

Her research on indoor fitness “riskscapes” during COVID-19 reveals how women navigated shifting material and social environments, reshaping practices of connection and wellbeing. Alongside Professor Holly Thorpe, she has developed a relational ethics of care framework that foregrounds vulnerability, interdependence, and situated ethics in post-pandemic research. Her co-developed coaching framework with Zoe Avner, Luke Jones, and Andrew Stodter further integrates feminist, intersectional, and affective principles into pedagogy and practice.

Emerging research and innovation

SPHERE’s postgraduate and early career researchers are expanding these agendas through innovative, practice-based methodologies that reimagine participation, representation, and inclusion.

Zoe Jeffery’s VibeStride project, a feminist-informed augmented reality gaming app, seeks to transform physical education by making it more inclusive and engaging for teenage girls. Recognised with the Alumni Innovation Award, the project exemplifies how feminist research can inspire creative, applied interventions that promote participation and wellbeing in digital and embodied spaces.