Participation, Performance, and Potential for Health: Towards Critical Geographies of Health and Sport

Abstract

Organised sport settings serve as key spaces for the potential production, maintenance, and experience of health. Although scholars have highlighted the problematic practices associated with health in these settings, it remains that participation in organised sport can offer opportunities for distinct health and wellbeing benefits across a range of physical, mental, and social outcomes. Yet, geographic research has rarely explored organised sport spaces in relation to health, instead focusing on the capacity of individualised exercise and fitness practices to promote or inhibit health. This paper considers how an integrated critical geography of health and sport could take inspiration from their respective sub-disciplines to explore how the organisation of sporting spaces influences and constructs experiences of health and wellbeing. In light of persisting structural inequities in health and sport, we propose a Lefebvrean Gendered Environmental Approach to understand the spatial production of inequitable sport environments and opportunities for participation, performance, and health. We argue that critical geographies of health and sport research could support enhanced geographical understandings of the maintenance and reproduction of health inequities in organised sport settings which could inform context-specific, equity-based interventions.