Sporting spinal cord injuries, social relations, and rehabilitation narratives: an ethnographic creative non-fiction of becoming disabled through sport

Working at the intersection of sociology and psychology, the purpose of this paper was to examine people’s experiences during rehabilitation of being and having an impaired body as a result of suffering a spinal cord injury (SCI) while playing sport. Interview data with men (n = 20) and observational data were collected. All data were analyzed using narrative analyses. To communicate findings in a way that can incorporate the complexity of results and reach wide audiences, the genre of ethnographic creative nonfiction was used. The ethnographic creative nonfiction extends research into issues related to disability, rehabilitation and sporting injury by 1) producing original empirical knowledge, 2) generating a theoretical account of human thought, affect and action as emerging not inside the individual but within social relations and the narratives that circulate between actors, and 3) capturing the impact of this research.