Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth. Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives looks at the issue from the perspective of those most affected, revealing the difficulties young people encounter with the “support system.” In-depth interviews with forty-five young people in Ottawa reveal that solutions do exist, predicated on recognition that the problem lies not with incorrigible youth, but with a social-aid structure that imposes barriers to success. Intervention is necessary, argue the authors, but not so much in the lives of young people as in the faulty structures that incorrectly presume how they interpret risk, poverty, and their own potential.

Drawing upon work in the fields of psychology and personal relations, Rhodes outlines a model of youth mentoring, explores the potential that exists in such relationships, and also exposes the risk of unsuccessful mentoring relationships.

This innovative collection convincingly argues that modern sport can be characterized by unequal and problematic power relations that are inextricably linked to issues of violence, harm, deviance, and punishment. On the one hand, sport is a mainstay of community building, an expression of solidarity, and a means to mental and social health. On the other, there is the star player who commits sexual violence, the trans athlete whose achievements are dismissed as fraudulent, or the racist and abusive nationalism of the impassioned sports fan. From drawing connections between head trauma and athletic violence to exploring the social meanings of sport in prison, contributors to this volume reimagine sport as an important unit of analysis for critical criminologists. Messages about crime, violence, and punishment in sport mirror broader relations of power that exist off the field. Situated at the intersections of sport, sporting culture, and crime, Power Played blows the whistle on the harm, violence, and exploitation embedded within.

Employment for former prisoners is a critical pathway toward reintegration into society and is central to the processes of desistance from crime. Nevertheless, the economic climate in Western countries has aggravated the ability of former prisoners and people with criminal records to find gainful employment. After Prison opens with a former prisoner’s story of reintegration employment experiences. Next, relying on a combination of research interviews, quantitative data, and literature, contributors present an international comparative review of Canada’s evolving criminal record legislation; the promotive features of employment; the complex constraints and stigma former prisoners encounter as they seek employment; and the individual and societal benefits of assisting former prisoners attain “gainful” employment. A main theme throughout is the interrelationship between employment and other central conditions necessary for safety and sustenance. This book offers suggestions for criminal record policy amendments and new reintegration practices that would assist individuals in the search for employment. Using the evidence and research findings of practitioners and scholars in social work, criminology and law, psychology, and other related fields, the contributors concentrate on strategies that will reduce the stigma of having been in prison; foster supportive relationships between social and legal agencies and prisons and parole systems; and encourage individually tailored resources and training following release of individuals.

"The chapters comprising this edited volume originate from a workshop organized at Carleton University in May of 2009"--Introd.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This book explores the carnal experience of fighting through a sensory ethnography of MMA, and how it transgresses the cultural scripts of masculinity in popular culture. Based on four years of participant observation in a local MMA club and in-depth interviews with amateur and professional MMA fighters, Spencer documents fighters' training regimes and the meanings they attach to participation in the sport. Drawing from the philosophical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book develops bodies-centered ontological and epistemological grounding for this study. Guided by such a position, it places bodies at the center of analysis of MMA and elucidates the embodied experience of pain and injury, and the sense and rhythms of fighting.

‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The book’s most innovative features are its empirical focus and theoretical orientation. While ethnographic research is a widespread and popular approach within the social sciences, combat sports and martial arts have yet to be sufficiently interrogated from an ethnographic standpoint. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.