Introduction

In 2004, the second volume in the Research in the Sociology of Sport book series was published (Young, 2004). At that time, Sporting Bodies, Damaged Selves: Sociological Studies of Sports-related Injury broke new ground on a topic that sociologists had been relatively slow in getting to.¹ As I wrote at the time, noting that “[…] sociology has not been fast out of the blocks in attending to matters of injury and pain in sport” (2004, p. xviii), it was exciting to publish a volume that represented one of the first collections of studies in our subdiscipline dedicated entirely to sports-related pain, risk, and injury research. Since that time, sociological attention in this area has expanded rapidly as, importantly, has the “imagination” scholars have brought to the subject matter. The current volume – the 12^th in the Research in the Sociology of Sport series – is the outcome of that “imagination.” Let me explain.