Appeal Of Participation Research Articles

Playing on Grassroots: The Anti-Apartheid Movement, Arthur Ashe, and the Sport Boycott

Abstract: The history of campaigns against apartheid through sport reveals messy relationships between athletes and social movements, advancing recent debates over the possibilities and constraints of sport politics. The anti-apartheid movement coalesced around a transnational sporting boycott to isolate South Africa, but the American tennis icon Arthur Ashe made a series of visits to compete there in the 1970s. Ashe believed in participation as the primary mechanism for change through sport, only later embracing the boycott. When tennis tournaments and rugby tours brought South Africans to the United States, anti-apartheid organizations mobilized their own confrontational protests to interrupt play. As the growing movement won over athletes and South African propaganda turned toward commercial sport spectacle, the special position that athletes occupied provided leverage. However, their magnified legacy also obscured how resistance to apartheid through sport found success in the first place. Despite the appeal of participation as the natural path of progress, strategies of confrontation often proved more effective in the struggle against apartheid. Questioning the politics of participation and widening the frame to consider confrontation changes our understanding of sport politics, looking beyond individual athletes and bringing everyday people off the sidelines.

How is cervical cancer screening information communicated in UK websites? Cross-sectional analysis of content and quantitative presentation formats

ObjectivesTo investigate whether UK websites about cervical cancer screening targeted to the public include (1) information about benefits and risks of screening, possible screening results and cervical cancer statistics, (2)...

Safeguarding the enthusiasm for environmental studies: small is even more beautiful than before

Several strategies ought to be considered to reduce the disillusionment and potentially paralyzing impact of the current political climate and anti-environmental stance of the US administration, which risk diminishing both environmental activism and the attractiveness of environmental studies courses. Examples demonstrate the potentials for refocusing both environmental activism and education on subnational levels, broadening the appeal of participation in environmental groups by bolstering socio-emotive rewards, capitalizing on the increasing convergence of environmental and corporate interests through internships, and linking environmental education more closely with subjects less vulnerable to the current mood. Additional efforts could be focused on bringing conservatives into environmental activism through a reorientation of environmental communications to correspond more closely to their interests (e.g., hunting and its dependence on habitat conservation) and their distinctive moral-value orientations.