Leveraging Disability Sport Events ― Impacts, Promises, and Possibilities

This empirically-grounded text examines the policy, planning, development and implementation of disability sport events. It draws insights from a major international comparative study of different types of large multi-national sporting events: integrated events where able-bodied athletes and athletes with a disability compete alongside one another, and non-integrated events where athletes with a disability are separated by time but occurring in the same location.

Guided by a critical disability studies perspective, the book highlights the strategic opportunity of sporting events to influence social change around community participation, and attitudes and awareness about disability more broadly. It also challenges assumptions about positive event legacies and suggests a need for a multi-lateral approach to planning.

An important read for students, researchers and scholars in the fields of sport policy, sport development, disability sport, sport management, disability studies and event studies.

Laura Misener is Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology at Western University, Canada. She is an Advisor on the Ontario Parasport Legacy group and a member of the International Paralympic Committee Impacts and Legacies Working Group. She is an Associate Editor for Leisure Sciences and is on the editorial boards of a number of highly ranked journals including Sport Management Review, and Journal of Sport and Tourism. Her work critically examines ways that sport events have been purported to positively affect community development, social infrastructure, social inclusion, and healthy lifestyles of community members.

Gayle McPherson holds a Chair in Events and Cultural Policy within the School of Media, Culture and Society at the University of the West of Scotland, UK, and is an Expert Advisor to the OECD on their draft recommendation Global Events and Local Development. She is a member of European Cultural Parliament and teaches at the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy, Germany. She is also a UK sub-panel member for REF 2021 on sport, exercise science, leisure and tourism. Her research interests revolve around the interventions of the local and national state and wider agencies in events and festivity of all types and the social and cultural impacts of large scale events on communities.

David McGillivray holds a Chair in Event and Digital Cultures at the University of the West of Scotland, UK, and is Deputy Editor of the Annals of Leisure Research. His research interests focus on a critical reading of the contemporary significance of events and festivals (sporting and cultural) as markers of identity and mechanisms for the achievement of wider economic, social and cultural externalities. His current research focuses on the value of digital media in enabling alternative readings of major sport events to find currency within the saturated media landscape.

David Legg is Professor and Department Chairperson at Mount Royal University, Canada. He teaches in the International Master of Adapted Physical Activity program at KU Leuven, Belgium. He was previously a member of the International Paralympic Committee's Sport Science Committee. His areas of focus are in sport management and adapted physical activity.