Journal of Sport Psychology in Action

Advancing Cultural Praxis in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology

The Journal of Sport Psychology in Action invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to advancing cultural praxis in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. This issue seeks to move beyond conceptual discussions and instead foreground how cultural praxis is enacted in practice, across diverse contexts, populations, and systems.

Cultural praxis is understood here as a dynamic and reflexive integration of cultural awareness, competence, humility, and safety, contextual responsiveness, and applied action. Importantly, culture is conceptualized broadly, extending beyond race and ethnicity to include, but not be limited to, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, language, religion, socioeconomic status, and intersecting identities. Submissions should move beyond surface-level acknowledgments of culture (e.g., demographic description or general statements of cultural sensitivity) and instead demonstrate how culture meaningfully shapes assessment, intervention, decision-making, and outcomes.

 

 Aims and Scope

This special issue will bring together applied contributions that demonstrate how cultural praxis can be meaningfully integrated into everyday professional work in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Submissions should provide clear, practice-oriented insights that inform culturally responsive work at one or more of the following levels:

• Individual practice (e.g., athlete/client work, counseling, performance interventions)
• Team and group environments (e.g., team culture, leadership, cohesion, group dynamics)
• Systems and organizational contexts (e.g., policies, program design, institutional practices, high-performance systems)

Across all contributions, there should be a strong emphasis on “how to”; that is, explicit strategies, frameworks, decision-making processes, or tools that practitioners can use in their work. Practical applications can be informed by scholarly work that reflects the bidirectional relationship between research and practice within the lens of cultural praxis. Contributions that reflect the complexity, tensions, and challenges of applied work, including instances where cultural praxis was difficult, incomplete, or required ongoing negotiation, are particularly welcomed. Submissions should provide sufficient practice transparency, enabling readers to understand what was done, how decisions were made, what adaptations occurred, and what was learned.

 

Types of Contributions

We welcome a range of manuscript types, including:

• Applied case studies and practice-based reports
• Empirical studies with clear and explicit applied implications
• Conceptual or methodological papers with concrete “how-to” guidance
• Program descriptions and evaluations
• Reflective practitioner accounts grounded in theory and/or evidence
• Commentaries, provided they articulate clear, actionable, and practice-relevant implications

Across all submission types, authors are encouraged, where appropriate, to include practical tools, frameworks, templates, or structured guidance that can be directly translated into practice.

 

Authorship and Collaboration Expectations

In line with the applied mission of the journal, this special issue places strong value on meaningful engagement with practice:

• Practitioners should be actively involved in authorship, where possible.
• Authors who are not practitioners are expected to demonstrate genuine and substantive collaboration with practitioners, clearly reflected in the design, implementation, and interpretation of the work.
• Submissions should reflect practice-informed scholarship, rather than solely theory-driven perspectives.

We strongly encourage:

• Multinational and cross-cultural authorship teams, where feasible
• Thoughtful consideration of representation and voice, including:
  • Representation within authorship teams, and/or
  • Explicit and meaningful representation of diverse identities within the work itself

 

Key Expectations for Submissions

All submissions should:

• Demonstrate how cultural praxis is operationalized in applied contexts
• Provide clear, actionable “how-to” guidance for practitioners
• Move beyond descriptive accounts to show how culture shapes practice and decision-making
• Engage in reflexivity, including the role, positioning, and assumptions of the practitioner
• Critically consider power, ethics, and representation, including whose voices are prioritized and how decisions may impact different stakeholders
• Address contextual complexity, rather than offering decontextualized or universalized solutions
• Show alignment between practice, theory, and/or empirical evidence, even in applied or reflective accounts
• Use clear and accessible language to facilitate uptake by practitioners while maintaining scholarly rigor