Mark Norman
Biographic Data
| ID | 261775 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Norman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Norman |
| SIGNATURE | NORMAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | McMaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0993-5016 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 32 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
“We have a lot of intergenerational trauma ourselves, but we bring it to the table”
Canada's federal correctional service has, since the 1970s, undertaken a variety of initiatives intended to redress the overrepresentation of people who identify as Indigenous within the criminal justice system. While researchers examine such policies and programs, the voices of those responsible for delivering “on-the-ground” interventions are largely absent. The current article addresses this gap by analyzing the occupational experience of Indi…
How incarcerated women experience sport in prison
Previous sociological research on sport in prisons has primarily focused on the male prison population. Against this background, this article deals with sport in women's prisons and analyzes qualitative studies published in English and German since the turn of the millennium in the form of a systematic review. The focus is on how incarcerated women experience and reflect on sport in prison and what meanings they attach to sport, according to prev…
Stop the Spread’
This study expounds on the media’s role in legitimating criminalization, lateral surveillance, and stigmatization as the appropriate response to violating public health restrictions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. Specifically, our qualitative content analysis of news articles (n = 66) reveals how media echoed politicians’ calls to “stop the spread” of the virus by making personal sacrifices, relied heavily on law enforcement s…
Even our hardest prisoners are being given free yoga lessons so they can find inner peace”
Yoga programs are a growing part of daily life in prisons around the globe. Yet, scholars have not deeply considered the extent to which mass media report upon, or the ways in which they frame, these interventions. We address this absence through an analysis of English-language newspaper written reportage on prison yoga from 1981 until 2022, comprising a total of 1448 unique articles originating from 31 countries. After a brief analysis of geogra…
To others it’s just tape
You’re Walking into Situations Where You Just Really Don’t Know How It’s Going to Go Down’
Following interviews with 150 Canadian federal parole officers employed in prisons or community spaces, we ‘spatialize’ parole work by analysing how participants perceive and navigate risk and use emotional labour in relation to their carceral workspaces. Employing Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the social production of space, we analyse how parole officers’ feelings of vulnerability arise from the interaction of the built environment with peop…
Digital Project
The Folklore Podcast was only ever supposed to be an experiment! In the Summer of 2016, I was searching for a decent podcast to listen to on the subject of folklore; as a folklore author and researcher based in the South-West of the United Kingdom, I thought that it might be useful for gathering extra information. I was looking for something accessible and engaging, not academic per se but with the same level of rigor. As it turned out, my search…
“You have to be really careful, in this environment, of what you say and what you do”
Drawing on existing literature on organizational culture in correctional work, in the current article we augment scholarship on community correctional services, specifically parole work, by considering how organizational culture, as narrated by frontline parole officers, impacts parole officers” feelings toward their work and their own health and well-being. Using the insights gained from 150 qualitative interviews with parole officers across Can…
“I’ve Seen More Dead People than I thought I Would”
Civilian administrative assistants who work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known as Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs), are frequently exposed to materials and/or experiences that are potentially psychologically traumatic. Drawing from 49 semi-structured interviews with DSAs, we analyze how these civilian personnel experience exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events, most notably, vicarious trauma. Specifically, we over…
I Think It’s Still a Male-Dominated World”
Police organizations, typically considered masculine paramilitary organizations, are employing increasing numbers of women in non-sworn roles. We investigate the experiences and perceptions of a specific group of non-sworn personnel, Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, unpacking their perceptions of a slowly-changing gendered organizational culture. We analyze how their fluid performances of femin…
Not everybody can do this job’
Many police organisations employ and rely on public servants to complete specialised tasks with their organisations. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) regularly hires public servants known as Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) to take on various support roles. As part of DSAs’ many clerical and administrative responsibilities, these workers must often perform emotional labour across different job tasks, which in turn, can be a personal …
Gender, risk, and presentation of self in “caring” prison work
While scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and hel…
I’ve Had Cases That Have Gone in the Wrong Direction and That Has Affected Me”
Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occu…
Sport for Development and Decolonization in a Settler Colonial State
This article considers if sport, broadly defined, can be constructed as a decolonizing practice for Indigenous Peoples incarcerated in Canadian prisons. Situating our analysis within transformative and decolonizing approaches to sport for development, we bring together disparate literatures—on settler colonialism and Indigenous incarceration, decolonization and Indigenous resurgence, and sport and incarceration—to critically analyze possibilities…
Operational and organisational stressors in community correctional work
In the current article, we investigate the occupational stressors parole and probation officers working in provincial correctional services in Ontario, Canada experience. We examine four specific stressors that emerged thematically from participants’ open-ended survey responses, and conceptualize these as operational factors (i.e., the duties of the job) or organisational factors (i.e., structural aspects of the organisation in which parole or pr…
Essential for the soul’
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in Canada, leisure activities and spaces became major sites of public debate and emotional expression about the efficacy, ethics, and social impacts of restrictive public health measures, as well as sites for the support or defiance of pandemic-related restrictions. In this paper, we analyze the ways that news media understood and represented public health measures and their relation to recreation, and participat…
In this line of work, boundaries are important”
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how correctional systems, including parole processes, work and function. As essential workers, parole officers continued to work through the pandemic, despite the upheaval to their typical occupational routines. Through these challenging times, they worked to meet the needs of parolees; yet, the challenges brought on by the pandemic caused considerable stress and created new occupational risks and v…
Sport and Incarceration
Despite a rapid expansion in research on Sport for Development (SfD), there remain numerous untapped veins of exploration. This article makes a novel argument for increasing the theoretical and substantive depth of SfD research by linking it to the relatively small, yet developing, body of literature on sport and incarceration. Drawing from the emergent field of carceral geography and the literature on prison sport, this article provides critical…
Public Sociology of Sport and Digital Media
In the past 15 years, sport scholars have expressed an increased interest in public sociology, while the rapid acceleration of digital media has led to significant shifts in the sport media landscape. In this paper, we analyze our experiences at the confluence of these two trends as scholarly bloggers about hockey. We present self-reflexive personal vignettes—centred around themes of engaging publics, marginality, and negative outcomes—and use in…
The folding of sport space into carceral space
Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate…
Researching sport in a ‘Total Institution’
This paper reflects on the methodological challenges faced during a qualitative research project on sport and physical culture in the Canadian federal prison system, during which the author tried and failed to gain access to observe sport programming and conduct interviews in two prisons. The paper has three principal aims. Firstly, to self-reflexively analyse the experience of failing to gain access to a research site and the subsequent methodol…
Encounters on the Field
This article seeks to contribute to debate about sport for social development. The purpose is to analyze the Football3 methodology and the de-structuring of delegations at a festival of Streetfootballworld during the Euro 2016 in France. Different to other scenarios where girls and boys participate separately and where delegations take part as national squads, this festival introduced a random system. Ethnographic work inspired by the sociology o…
Goldfields and the Gothic
History should not be a dry and lifeless subject. The days of ‘crusty old professors’ in dusty offices are, in the main, long gone. There is so much about our social history and folklore to excite
Tales of Medieval Dublin
How UFOs Conquered the World
There are probably two subjects within the fields of Fortean investigation, or the study of unexplained phenomena (depending on how you want to approach it), which produce more printed matter and m
Saturday Night’s Alright for Tweeting
Drawing upon data collected during the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2011 Hockey Day in Canada broadcast, this paper examines how users of Twitter variously reproduced or contested this mediated television program. Three emergent themes from these data are discussed: the sociocultural importance of hockey to Canadians; the corporate sponsorship of Hockey Day in Canada ; and the role of controversial commentator Don Cherry on the Canadian pu…
Online Community or Electronic Tribe? Exploring the Social Characteristics and Spatial Production of an Internet Hockey Fan Culture
Scholarly interest in the relationship between sport and new media has increased significantly in recent years, yet research about online sport fan groups remains limited. This article contributes to this body of literature through an ethnographic examination of a fan-produced hockey blog called Nucks Misconduct. The article examines the blog's social characteristics by conceptualizing it as an electronic tribe-that is, a fluid, neotribal social …
I’ve Had Cases That Have Gone in the Wrong Direction and That Has Affected Me”
Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occu…
Public Sociology of Sport and Digital Media
In the past 15 years, sport scholars have expressed an increased interest in public sociology, while the rapid acceleration of digital media has led to significant shifts in the sport media landscape. In this paper, we analyze our experiences at the confluence of these two trends as scholarly bloggers about hockey. We present self-reflexive personal vignettes—centred around themes of engaging publics, marginality, and negative outcomes—and use in…
Encounters on the Field
This article seeks to contribute to debate about sport for social development. The purpose is to analyze the Football3 methodology and the de-structuring of delegations at a festival of Streetfootballworld during the Euro 2016 in France. Different to other scenarios where girls and boys participate separately and where delegations take part as national squads, this festival introduced a random system. Ethnographic work inspired by the sociology o…
The folding of sport space into carceral space
Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate…
Sport in the underlife of a total institution
While it is clear from a small body of scholarly literature that sport and physical activity play important roles in the daily lives of many inmates in diverse prison contexts around the world, there remains relatively little research that sociologically explores the significance of these physical practices in correctional environments. This paper helps to address this gap by examining one of the key tensions in prison sport: its deployment by co…
Gender, risk, and presentation of self in “caring” prison work
While scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and hel…
Sport and Incarceration
Despite a rapid expansion in research on Sport for Development (SfD), there remain numerous untapped veins of exploration. This article makes a novel argument for increasing the theoretical and substantive depth of SfD research by linking it to the relatively small, yet developing, body of literature on sport and incarceration. Drawing from the emergent field of carceral geography and the literature on prison sport, this article provides critical…
Driving to the 'Net
On October 24, 2012, the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League announced a plan to move from their current stadium in Nassau County to the recently opened Barclays Center in the borough of Brooklyn, marking the end of a decades-long political saga about whether and where to build a new home arena for the club. During this time, the Islanders franchise strove to mobilize support for the ostensible benefits of the stadium development and…
I Think It’s Still a Male-Dominated World”
Police organizations, typically considered masculine paramilitary organizations, are employing increasing numbers of women in non-sworn roles. We investigate the experiences and perceptions of a specific group of non-sworn personnel, Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, unpacking their perceptions of a slowly-changing gendered organizational culture. We analyze how their fluid performances of femin…
Sport for Development and Decolonization in a Settler Colonial State
This article considers if sport, broadly defined, can be constructed as a decolonizing practice for Indigenous Peoples incarcerated in Canadian prisons. Situating our analysis within transformative and decolonizing approaches to sport for development, we bring together disparate literatures—on settler colonialism and Indigenous incarceration, decolonization and Indigenous resurgence, and sport and incarceration—to critically analyze possibilities…
Essential for the soul’
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in Canada, leisure activities and spaces became major sites of public debate and emotional expression about the efficacy, ethics, and social impacts of restrictive public health measures, as well as sites for the support or defiance of pandemic-related restrictions. In this paper, we analyze the ways that news media understood and represented public health measures and their relation to recreation, and participat…
In this line of work, boundaries are important”
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how correctional systems, including parole processes, work and function. As essential workers, parole officers continued to work through the pandemic, despite the upheaval to their typical occupational routines. Through these challenging times, they worked to meet the needs of parolees; yet, the challenges brought on by the pandemic caused considerable stress and created new occupational risks and v…
In flight or in plight? The current state of audio visual departments in Australian CAEs
Given that the Commonwealth Government intends to maximise the number of students in tertiary education with a minimum increase in funding, this research aimed to review the effects of reduced Government funding on the services of Audio Visual Departments between 1980 and 1986. This study sets a "bench mark" on the current state of Audio Visual Departments. The scenario formed by the responses is not encouraging. Funding cuts, static or reduced s…
Saturday Night’s Alright for Tweeting
Drawing upon data collected during the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2011 Hockey Day in Canada broadcast, this paper examines how users of Twitter variously reproduced or contested this mediated television program. Three emergent themes from these data are discussed: the sociocultural importance of hockey to Canadians; the corporate sponsorship of Hockey Day in Canada ; and the role of controversial commentator Don Cherry on the Canadian pu…
Tackling PeaceThe Games They Play
Book Review| July 01 2013 Tackling PeaceThe Games They Play Tackling Peace, (2009). Directed by Marc Radsomsky. GFN Productions and Dreamstone Productions. 55 mins.The Games They Play, (2010). Directed by Ram Loevy. Ram Loevy Communications and Echoes of Lasting Peace. 60 mins. Mark Norman Mark Norman University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2013) 40 (2): 313–315. https://doi.org/1…
Online Community or Electronic Tribe? Exploring the Social Characteristics and Spatial Production of an Internet Hockey Fan Culture
Scholarly interest in the relationship between sport and new media has increased significantly in recent years, yet research about online sport fan groups remains limited. This article contributes to this body of literature through an ethnographic examination of a fan-produced hockey blog called Nucks Misconduct. The article examines the blog's social characteristics by conceptualizing it as an electronic tribe-that is, a fluid, neotribal social …
Paranormal Devon
Driving to the 'Net
On October 24, 2012, the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League announced a plan to move from their current stadium in Nassau County to the recently opened Barclays Center in the borough of Brooklyn, marking the end of a decades-long political saga about whether and where to build a new home arena for the club. During this time, the Islanders franchise strove to mobilize support for the ostensible benefits of the stadium development and…
Tales of Medieval Dublin
How UFOs Conquered the World
There are probably two subjects within the fields of Fortean investigation, or the study of unexplained phenomena (depending on how you want to approach it), which produce more printed matter and m
Sport in the underlife of a total institution
While it is clear from a small body of scholarly literature that sport and physical activity play important roles in the daily lives of many inmates in diverse prison contexts around the world, there remains relatively little research that sociologically explores the significance of these physical practices in correctional environments. This paper helps to address this gap by examining one of the key tensions in prison sport: its deployment by co…
Researching sport in a ‘Total Institution’
This paper reflects on the methodological challenges faced during a qualitative research project on sport and physical culture in the Canadian federal prison system, during which the author tried and failed to gain access to observe sport programming and conduct interviews in two prisons. The paper has three principal aims. Firstly, to self-reflexively analyse the experience of failing to gain access to a research site and the subsequent methodol…
Encounters on the Field
This article seeks to contribute to debate about sport for social development. The purpose is to analyze the Football3 methodology and the de-structuring of delegations at a festival of Streetfootballworld during the Euro 2016 in France. Different to other scenarios where girls and boys participate separately and where delegations take part as national squads, this festival introduced a random system. Ethnographic work inspired by the sociology o…
Goldfields and the Gothic
History should not be a dry and lifeless subject. The days of ‘crusty old professors’ in dusty offices are, in the main, long gone. There is so much about our social history and folklore to excite
Public Sociology of Sport and Digital Media
In the past 15 years, sport scholars have expressed an increased interest in public sociology, while the rapid acceleration of digital media has led to significant shifts in the sport media landscape. In this paper, we analyze our experiences at the confluence of these two trends as scholarly bloggers about hockey. We present self-reflexive personal vignettes—centred around themes of engaging publics, marginality, and negative outcomes—and use in…
The folding of sport space into carceral space
Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate…
Sport and Incarceration
Despite a rapid expansion in research on Sport for Development (SfD), there remain numerous untapped veins of exploration. This article makes a novel argument for increasing the theoretical and substantive depth of SfD research by linking it to the relatively small, yet developing, body of literature on sport and incarceration. Drawing from the emergent field of carceral geography and the literature on prison sport, this article provides critical…
Operational and organisational stressors in community correctional work
In the current article, we investigate the occupational stressors parole and probation officers working in provincial correctional services in Ontario, Canada experience. We examine four specific stressors that emerged thematically from participants’ open-ended survey responses, and conceptualize these as operational factors (i.e., the duties of the job) or organisational factors (i.e., structural aspects of the organisation in which parole or pr…
Essential for the soul’
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in Canada, leisure activities and spaces became major sites of public debate and emotional expression about the efficacy, ethics, and social impacts of restrictive public health measures, as well as sites for the support or defiance of pandemic-related restrictions. In this paper, we analyze the ways that news media understood and represented public health measures and their relation to recreation, and participat…
In this line of work, boundaries are important”
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how correctional systems, including parole processes, work and function. As essential workers, parole officers continued to work through the pandemic, despite the upheaval to their typical occupational routines. Through these challenging times, they worked to meet the needs of parolees; yet, the challenges brought on by the pandemic caused considerable stress and created new occupational risks and v…
“You have to be really careful, in this environment, of what you say and what you do”
Drawing on existing literature on organizational culture in correctional work, in the current article we augment scholarship on community correctional services, specifically parole work, by considering how organizational culture, as narrated by frontline parole officers, impacts parole officers” feelings toward their work and their own health and well-being. Using the insights gained from 150 qualitative interviews with parole officers across Can…
“I’ve Seen More Dead People than I thought I Would”
Civilian administrative assistants who work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known as Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs), are frequently exposed to materials and/or experiences that are potentially psychologically traumatic. Drawing from 49 semi-structured interviews with DSAs, we analyze how these civilian personnel experience exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events, most notably, vicarious trauma. Specifically, we over…
I Think It’s Still a Male-Dominated World”
Police organizations, typically considered masculine paramilitary organizations, are employing increasing numbers of women in non-sworn roles. We investigate the experiences and perceptions of a specific group of non-sworn personnel, Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, unpacking their perceptions of a slowly-changing gendered organizational culture. We analyze how their fluid performances of femin…
Not everybody can do this job’
Many police organisations employ and rely on public servants to complete specialised tasks with their organisations. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) regularly hires public servants known as Detachment Services Assistants (DSAs) to take on various support roles. As part of DSAs’ many clerical and administrative responsibilities, these workers must often perform emotional labour across different job tasks, which in turn, can be a personal …
Gender, risk, and presentation of self in “caring” prison work
While scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and hel…
I’ve Had Cases That Have Gone in the Wrong Direction and That Has Affected Me”
Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occu…
Sport for Development and Decolonization in a Settler Colonial State
This article considers if sport, broadly defined, can be constructed as a decolonizing practice for Indigenous Peoples incarcerated in Canadian prisons. Situating our analysis within transformative and decolonizing approaches to sport for development, we bring together disparate literatures—on settler colonialism and Indigenous incarceration, decolonization and Indigenous resurgence, and sport and incarceration—to critically analyze possibilities…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Public relations (12 works) · Criminology (11 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (9 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (9 works)