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.
Sports violence and society
This chapter outlines an approach to classroom teaching that makes use of physical movement alongside more traditional lecturing methods when delivering lessons on abstract theoretical material. It develops the notion of embodied learning as a ‘physical metaphor’, outlining some examples of this practice that we have used in our recent work with a class of first year undergraduates.
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.
Love Fighting Hate Violence: An anti-violence programme
This chapter outlines the Love Fighting Hate Violence (LFHV) project; an anti-violence initiative aimed at inspiring reflection and generating pedagogical interventions within martial arts and combat sports.
Understanding sports violence – revisiting foundational explorations
Within this paper, we discuss the importance of attending to definitions of ‘violence’. Through a return to a selection of important foundational works, we attempt to unpack the fundamental meanings of violence in a general sense, and sport violence in particular.
‘It’s only sport’ – the symbolic neutralisation of ‘violence’
Within the commodified world of professional ice hockey, athletes sell their bodily performances in return for a salary. A central feature of this transaction is the very real risk of physical injury – a risk inherent within most contact sports, but particularly so within those that feature seemingly ‘violent’ confrontations between competitors, as ice hockey is widely reputed to do.
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.
Approaching the gendered phenomenon of women warriors
Our initial motivation for producing Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World began several years ago when, as PhD candidates studying together at Loughborough University in the UK, Dr. Alex Channon and I developed a shared interest in combat sports through our separate but related research projects.
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.