Publications
Below are a selection of my most important academic contributions, which you’re welcome to download.
Join the member area
To access videos, seminars, talks and other useful content from The Immersive Research Consultant, click the sign up button below.
Access member-only content for just £2 a month
This small fee helps me cover the running costs of the website. You’ll have access to hours of content about social science, teaching, supervision and career development along with monthly live sessions. Plus, you can suggest topics for future videos.
Filter Tags
- Active 1
- Amateur 1
- Anti-violence 1
- Athletes 1
- Becoming 2
- Behaviour Change 1
- Biology 1
- Body 1
- Boxing 8
- Brain Damage 1
- Campaign 1
- Combat Sports 2
- Competence 1
- Concussion 1
- Consent 1
- Definitions 1
- Detachment 2
- Drugs 1
- Embodiment 2
- Empowerment 1
- Ethnography 6
- Excitement 1
- Exclusivity 2
- Fans 1
- Fighting 7
- Globalisation 1
- Health 1
- Hegemony 3
- Higher Education 3
- Ice Hockey 1
- Ideology 2
- Immersive Research 9
- Injury 1
- Insider 2
- Interaction 1
- Involvement 2
- Kinetic Learning 1
- LFHV 1
- Learning 4
- Lecturing 3
- Love Fighting Hate Violence 1
- Male Preserve 2
- Martial Arts 3
- Masculinity 7
- Men 2
- Men's Health 1
- Mimetic 2
- Money 1
- Movement 1
- Nottingham Panthers 1
Myths and Reality Building
How do myths become real? This paper explores that question in relation to boxing, and a short video overview accompanies it.
Communicating consent in sport. Paper discussion with Dr. Alex Channon
Consent in sport is under-theorised and under-evidenced. In this video, Alex and I discuss our process for pulling research together on the topic. It's taken us over a decade of chatting, thinking and formally collecting data to write up. We think there’s a lot to be learned from understanding how we work together.
The fog soon clears: Brain injuries in boxing
Boxing is ‘all about bodies’; beautiful bodies, broken bodies and, sometimes, brain-damaged bodies. And while a lot of research has explored the physiological side of ‘punch drunk’ syndrome, far less work has attempted to consider how boxers experience brain injuries.
The 'male preserve' thesis: Sporting culture and men's power
In exposing the inequalities enshrined within sports culture, along with the manifold dangers endured by boys and men in the stakes of ‘proving’ masculinity in and through sport, this body of scholarship placed the potentially harmful nature of the masculinity–sport relationship firmly into the academic discourse on sport and society.
Becoming a decent man
During the ten or so years that I’ve been involved in boxing I’ve seen countless people change their bodies, behaviours and performances of self. For many, this has been neatly understood as a simple process of becoming a boxer.
In large part, such ‘becoming’ involves moving from pugilistic newcomer towards a relatively comfortable embodiment of the physical and emotional grammars that are commonplace within boxing subcultures.
On (not) becoming a boxer
Critics of the Chicago School’s early adoption of immersive qualitative research methodologies claimed they were breaking down an important distance between researcher and participant. These initial arguments were usually couched in the dichotomous comparison of objectivity vs subjectivity. And while the debate has shifted since these early forays, there is still a requirement for researchers to explore the position they occupy in relation to the people they are attempting to understand.
The tyranny of the male preserve
Within this paper I draw on short vignettes and quotes taken from a two-year ethnographic study of boxing to think through the continuing academic merit of the notion of the male preserve. This is an important task due to evidence of shifts in social patterns of gender that have developed since the idea was first proposed in the 1970s.
Being nosey
Within this chapter, I use a collection of extended data excerpts from the study as the basis from which I think through issues connected to my time in the field, as well as embodied research more broadly.
Biology ideology and pastiche hegemony
As knowledge about the biological foundation of the modern patriarchal gender order is increasingly challenged within late-modern social worlds, enclaves persist in which men and women can attempt to recreate understandings of the ‘natural’ basis of sex difference. Within ‘Power Gym’, male boxers were able to symbolise their bodies and behaviors in such a manner.
Study a PhD with Dr. Christopher R. Matthews
I specialise in conducting and supervising immersive research, but I’m keen to discuss various projects and research methods with prospective students as well.