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'Everything I enjoy doing I just couldn't do': Biographical disruption for sport-related injury

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-11-01, 15:19 authored by Dominic MalcolmDominic Malcolm, Emma PullenEmma Pullen
This article draws on interview data with a population of non-elite sport/exercise participants (n = 20) to illustrate the interrelationship between biographical disruption and sport-related injury. It argues that contrary to the significance implied by their lack of prominence on current public health agendas, sport-related injuries can have a devastating personal impact, comparable to the more extreme variants of biographical disruption depicted in the literature on chronic illness. It seeks to explain the apparent incongruence between biophysical severity and subjective assessment of impact, by invoking notions of community normalisation and imagined futures, and identifying the unavailability of what subjects evaluate as effective medical support. These factors combine to problematise the attainment of biographical repair. It further highlights how biographical contingencies such as youthfulness, distinction through exhibiting responsible citizenship and the sense of failure to exert bodily self-management through exercise, perpetuate and escalate both biographical disruption and chronic illness. The paper thus illustrates the aetiological interdependence of biographical disruption and chronic illness as exercisers exacerbate relatively minor ailments due to their reluctance to modify habitual routines.

Funding

This research was supported by a Wellcome Trust Small Grant (grant no. 102651/Z/13/Z).

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Health

Volume

24

Issue

4

Pages

366 - 383

Citation

MALCOLM, D. and PULLEN, E., 2020. 'Everything I enjoy doing I just couldn't do': Biographical disruption for sport-related injury. Health, 24 (4), pp.366-383.

Publisher

SAGE Publications © The Authors

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-01

Publication date

2018-09-25

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Health and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459318800142.

ISSN

1363-4593

eISSN

1461-7196

Language

  • en

Location

England