Book review: Sport as social policy: Midnight Football and the governing of society by David Ekholm and Magnus Dahlstedt, Abingdon, Routledge, 2023, 232 pp., ISBN 9781032124773
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dahlstedt provide a Foucaldian-infused analysis to well-worn, yet still highly relevant debates on the role sport as a tool "for social good" and social policy.The book is divided in thirteen chapters.The first three chapters provide an informative overview of current knowledge on sport as an instrument of social policy and a generally clear outline of the book's analytical framework and methodology.As the book's perspective on the topic mainly revolves around a Foucaldian framework, in chapter 1 the authors provide an outline of notions such as power, genealogy, discourse, technology, governmentality, and explain their use in the book through Foucault's notion of problematisation (p.11).In chapter 2, the authors provide an overview of sport interventions in other contexts (from Canada to Brazil, to US and Belgium) to locate the empirical focus of the book in wider trends in relation to sport and social policy.Chapter 3 provides a contextual overview of the sport intervention in question, Midnight Football (MF), explaining the functioning of the project in specific (anonymised) neighbourhoods of two (anonymised) Swedish cities.The chapter also provides some methodological and ethical considerations on the long-term qualitative research that informed the study, although it is worth nothing that a lack of temporal references for the study itself (the reader is not clearly told from in what timeframe the study occurred) does not help in locating the study, and the authors' discussion in a wider historical, social, political (and policy) context.The nine chapters that follow delve into the presentation and discussion of the data, each addressing a key discursive and policy formations related to the practices of Midnight Football.Chapter 4 provides a discussion of the discursive formation of the urban periphery as a context of localisation of social problems on which the activities of MF are set
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".