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Abstract
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The Research Topic Concussion and sport: a sociocultural perspective is inextricably tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Partly this relates to timing, as COVID-19 became the topic of conversation through which we (the editorial team) came to forge our working relationship. Editorial meetings invariably began with comparisons of transmission rates, restrictions on social contact and latterly vaccine up-take in our respective parts of the world. But there are deeper parallels, between COVID-19 and brain injury in sport as public health issues. In this article we draw attention to these parallels as a way of introducing some key sociocultural aspects of concussion in sport as a public health crisis.
For a number of years, authors of both populist texts (Carroll and Rosner, 2011) and medical journal articles (Zemek et al., 2016) have described concussion as an epidemic. More recently, concerns about concussion have become global in scope, inviting reclassification to pandemic (Malcolm, 2020). While it is important to draw a distinction between an epidemic/pandemic as technically defined--notably concussion is neither a disease nor infectious--increasingly, non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as heart disease and cancer have been shown to have characteristics of transmissibility; they can be passed along "via social networks, the built environment, social and economic conditions, and intergenerational transmission" (Allen, 2017, p. 6). Thus, "There is much to gain from viewing the rise of preventable NCD mortality and morbidity as a pandemic" (Allen, 2017, p. 8). The temporally specific structural features of the society in which any public health crisis arises crucially influence the way these conditions are experienced.
The importance of understanding the historical, social, economic and political factors specific to a pandemic are equally evident in our understanding of the transmission of COVID-19 and the phenomenon of brain injury in sport. For instance, the impact of COVID-19 is fundamentally linked to the degree of global interconnectedness (of particular nations) at this particular point in human history, and the impact of concussion across sport is similarly shaped by contemporary modes of communication and sports fandom. It has become something of a truism in COVID times to say that the pandemic has accelerated social trends that were already evident (e.g., the move toward online retail) and exposed the fault lines or weaknesses in our societies that already existed (e.g., the greater impact on already disadvantaged populations). Similarly, it could be said that debates about concussion in sport are the latest in a long series of concerns about the violence of certain sports, but debates that have exposed as never before the risk culture of sports and the asymmetric power relations between players, coaches and medical staff...
Language: en |