Retired Performers? Reflections for Movement Practice

Retired Performers’ Reflections for Movement Practice explores how former expert performers from the realms of sport, dance, and movement practice relate to and subsequently teach, coach, or instruct their disciplines. This edited collection is the first of its kind to bring together sociologically informed accounts from former expert performers regarding the influence of their ongoing reflections on how they now choose to navigate performance spaces.

The chapters examine the legacy of each author’s involvement in their movement performance space, but they specifically do so with a focus on how their post-performance experiences and reflections have reoriented how they approach their coaching practice, instruction, pedagogy, and community engagement.

This book is key reading for graduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and researchers interested in performance retirement experiences, sports coaching, dance, movement, sport sociology, and well-being.

Luke Jones, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Lecturer in Sport Coaching in the Department for Health at the University of Bath, UK. He is also a member of the SPHERE Research Centre at Bath. He is a former youth international (Wales) and semiprofessional footballer. His doctoral research and subsequent research programme have focused on exploring retirement from sport using a sociocultural perspective, including how former athletes relate to their own exercise and, more recently, the longer-term experience of retirement from high-performance sport.

Zoë Avner, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Lecturer in Sports Coaching at Deakin University, Australia, and a former French youth international and semiprofessional footballer. Her research draws on poststructuralist and feminist methodologies to explore athlete and coach learning, power and coaching, and coaching ethics. Broadly, her work seeks to support the development of more ethical coaching practices and more diverse, equitable, and inclusive physical cultures both within traditional mainstream and emerging alternative lifestyle sporting contexts.

Allison Jeffrey, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Lecturer of Sport Sociology in the Department for Health at the University of Bath, UK. She is a member of the SPHERE Research Centre at Bath and a co-lead of the Body, Movement and Culture (BMC) research group at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research engages more-than-human theoretical frameworks and the philosophy of posthumanism to expand understandings of moving bodies. She is interested in experimental methodological practices that challenge humanist assumptions in sport and is working with a range of international scholars who are similarly engaging with innovative research processes. Themes of her current projects include digital health, well-being, climate change, ageing, and relational ethics.