Sport, Education and Society

The Problem of Performance Dominating Sport, Education and Society

Authors are invited to submit an abstract which outlines how they understand, approach, explore, and/or work to address, The Problem of Performance Dominating Sport, Education and Society.

All forms of articles will be considered, but priority will be given to rigorous and provocative essay/commentary style submissions which are a written in an accessible and creative manner. Example commentary papers from the guest editors are discussed in the special issue narrative below. Authors are encouraged to consider how their work might articulate with, respond to, and/or critique the ideas developed in that series of recent papers.

Please contact the special issue editors, Christopher R. Matthews and Jack Hardwicke, if you would like to discuss an idea.

 

Special Issue Narrative: The Problem of Performance Dominating Sport, Education and Society

For a combined 65 years we have played, trained and competed in various sports. This process started out as young children involving broadly healthy, fun, enjoyable and physically active leisure time. And quickly progressed, before and during our teenage years, into something which had far more in common with work. That is, we became involved in a highly structured, regulated and organised version of physical activity called ‘performance-sport’. Consequently, healthy and educational leisure pursuits became twisted and contorted as we found ourselves immersed in cultures where damaging behaviours were valorised and people didn’t seem to have as much fun.   

Of those years, the most recent 25 have been spent studying performance ideologies and their influence in shaping forms of sport, education and society. While our personal experiences inform that work, we have been led to this area of academic focus by clear problems documented by scholars since the burgeoning of the critical study of sport by the likes of Harry Edwards, Paul Hoch and Jean-Marie Brohm. That is, as we recently argued with colleagues in this journal, “professional and performance focused sports are often socially, politically and ethically questionable enterprises” (Matthews et al, 2024, 2).

Things are not as they should be in many sporting landscapes. With that in mind, we have recently developed commentary essays designed to pull together various strands of our concerns in academic (Hardwicke et al, 2024; 2025; Matthews et al, 2024; Matthews, 2024) and popular publications (Hardwicke and Matthews 2024; 2025; Hardwicke, Matthews and Taylor, 2024). Our aim, in this regard, has been to make a quite clear series of statements from which colleagues, activists and those who study with us, might be able to work with increased precision and persistence to tackle the problems we face.

The truth is, we are angered and deeply frustrated by the status quo. Performance-sport has become such a dominant force in Western society, and beyond, that other, far more positive and unproblematic ways of imagining physical education, healthy leisure, and physical activity, have been, and continue to be, increasingly marginalised. With colleagues, we make this problem clear in relation to youth sport:

Since the initial development of critical observations from scholars of youth and sport studies, the model of performance sport has acceded to almost ‘natural’ status across various Western cultures. One of the central problems here is the ‘professionalising’ of youth sports, which follows from the continued ‘creep’ of the performance model and its underlying ideologies into children’s leisure time, physical activity/education and play (Matthews et al, 2024, 3).

We understand this to be a fundamental problem for the human race. That is to say, we believe the positive characteristics of physical activity, physical education and healthy leisure time which are eviscerated by performance-sport, are central to the human condition.

Key to this is play. Or, more accurately, the way playing and being playful was taken away from us, and many young people like us, as we ‘progressed’ in sport. We think that’s sad. This led us to recently argue that sport should be a space to allow players to play (Matthews et al., 2024). So, within this special issue, we seek to engage scholars to expand, critique, and develop upon our starting points so as to consider what a more playful future for sport, education and society should be.

While various formats of submissions will be encouraged, we ask scholars to consider contributing following the commentary/essay format we have used in the papers above. We believe this style of writing, when combined with a dedicated discussion of critical academic literature and detailed empirical observations, is well suited to approaching a topic of this sort with its political, moral and often clear personal relevance. We hope the special issue will provide powerful, provocative and rigorous ways forward for those that share our concern with the status quo across various sporting landscapes.

 

Possible areas of focus:

·         Sport, physical activity and public health

·         The problems of ‘PE-as-sport’

·         Sport and/or education and policy

·         Critique of sport science teaching and research focuses

·         Academics complicity and culpability in various problematic performance sports

·         Problematising ‘sport for development’ organisations

·         Child-centred coaching and/or ethical issues of professionalised youth sport

·         Sport, work and child labour

·         The ethics of ‘Talent Identification’ in children

·         Informal sport and leisure

·         Child abuse in performance-sport

·         Sport and climate change

·         Sport, women and health

·         Sports as work

·         Youth informal sports

·         ‘Sportwashing’, power, politics and corruption in the business of sport

To submit an ‘interest to contribute’ to the Special Issue, we invite you to submit a 300-word abstract and short author biographies to the lead Guest Editor: Christopher R. Matthews, [email protected].

Final paper submissions will be a maximum of 7,500 words inclusive of references. Shorter but as rigorous papers will be welcomed.

All submissions should follow SES guidelines.

All papers will undergo blind review by a minimum of two referees.

 

Submission timeline

Call for papers goes live: December 2025

Abstract submission: 1^st February 2026

Acceptance notification: 1^st March 2026

Submission of full manuscript deadline: 1^st October 2026

 

 

References

Hardwicke, J., Matthews, C.R. (2025) Beyond Myths – Thinking Critically about Sport’s Role in Public Health - Engaging Sports

Hardwicke, J., Matthews, C.R., and Taylor, K. (2024). Women’s rugby and brain injuries – the painful cost of gender equality. The Conversation.

Hardwicke, J., AlHashmi, R., Forbes, D., Paetcher, C., Pocock, M., Taylor, K., Yeagers, D. and Matthews, C. (2024). Is gender equality in brain damage ‘progress’ for women and sport? International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 59(6), 941-953.

Hardwicke, J., Bottomley, D., Coates, E., Hindley, D., Rzepka, M. and Matthews, C.R. (2025). Destroying the myth that performance-sport promotes public health. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics. ISSN 1940-6940

Hardwicke, J., Matthews, C.R., 2024. All work and no play: does performance sport rob young people of their childhood? The Sociological Review Magazine. ISSN 2754-1371

Matthews, C.R., 2024. Towards a ‘single-minded’ social science that matters. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11 (1): 1299. ISSN 2662-9992

Matthews, C. R., Barker-Ruchti, N., Coates, E., Lang, M., & Hardwicke, J. (2024). Children’s rights, human development and play – rejecting performance-orientated youth sport. Sport, Education and Society, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2024.2385556