Exploring activism type in social justice and disability sport: current status and future prospects of the disability social movement

Abstract

The disability movement developed from an initial stage with emphasis on empowering discriminated people towards a stage with emphasis on enabling human rights. Accordingly, throughout history disabled people have participated in various forms of activism, including sports. Since the establishment of the Paralympic games, disability sport has become a potentially useful platform to raise public awareness on the disability right movement. That is because elite disabled athletes are given much attention in various public spaces (e.g., the media) in comparison to other disabled people. The current study aimed to expand the literature on disabled athlete activism by categorizing the forms of activism that disabled people engage in and identifying commonalities and differences across three sports status levels (elite athletes, retired athletes and non-athletes). Participants were 11 disabled elite athletes, 4 retired athletes, and 6 non-athletes in South Korea. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using narrative analysis with regards to: style and type of activism; consequences of activism; comparison of activism among the three different sports status levels. The results were categorized into ‘Social activism’ (e.g., motivational speech), ‘Scholar activism’ (e.g., research), ‘Political activism’ (e.g., candlelight protest), ‘Sport-based activism’ (e.g., athletes), and ‘Online activism’ (e.g., blog). Compared to non-athlete activism, which focused mainly on political activism, athlete activism focused mainly on social, scholar, and sport-based activism. These findings provide key knowledge of the current status of the sport disability activism movement and, furthermore, provide possible directions of its near-future development.