The Choice is Yours column by Gregor Wolbring

The Future of Sport

January 15^th 2010

http://politicsofhealth.org/wol/2010-01-15.htm

The Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic winter games are a big event for Vancouver, British Columbia and Canada as a whole. Big games such as the Olympics and the Paralympics give raise to various thoughts. Vancouver 2010, The Globe and Mail, and the University of British Columbia in collaboration with universities across Canada, are partnering on a project of generating podcast > that cover various topics related to the 2010 Winter Games.

My podcast (you have to scroll down to me) has the title Who will be the future Olympic and Paralympic athlete? The impact of advances in science and technology and bodily assistive devices on Sport. It looks at the impact of science and technology advances on sport. The two main points of my presentation are that so far the discourse around so called therapeutic bodily assistive devices in sport is too limited as is the discourse around enhancement and sport in general. (a transcript is available)

The most recent podcast is James Meadowcroft’s Accelerating the Transition to Sustainable Development and the first one was from Bruce Kidd with the title What do the Olympic Games Contribute to Society?

So far the podcasts only generated 6 comments which seems to be strange taking into account the breadth of thoughts in the podcasts and that many single articles in newspapers often generate huge responses.

I think the podcasts deserve to be more noticed and to recieve more reflections by others.

The Choice is Yours:

New and emerging technologies shape social expectations and vice versa. Sport is in the forefront of this nexus. Its up to you to be involved as how the discourse shapes up will impact also you.

All of the "The Choice is Yours" articles till June 2009 can be found here, after June 2009 here

Gregor Wolbring is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine, Dept of Community Health Science, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies. He is Affiliated Scholar, Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, USA; Part Time Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa Canada; Adjunct Faculty Critical Disability Studies, York University, Canada. He is a science and technology governance scholar, a disability/vari-ability/ability studies scholar, and a health policy and science and technology studies researcher. He is the Chair of the Bioethics Taskforce of Disabled People's International. He publishes the Bioethics, Culture and Disability website, authors a weblog on NBICS and its social implications and on Ableism and Ability Ethics and Governance and contributes to the What Sorts of People blog.