Reviewing the Variability-Overuse Injury Hypothesis: Does Movement Variability Relate to Landing Injuries?

Purpose: Overuse injuries are common in sport, but complete understanding of injury risk factors remains incomplete. Although biomechanical studies frequently examine musculoskeletal injury mechanisms, human movement variability studies aim to better understand neuromotor functioning, with proposed connections between overuse injury mechanisms and changes in motor variability. Method: In a narrative review, we discuss the variability-overuse injury hypothesis, which suggests repeated load application leads to mechanical tissue breakdown and subsequent injury when exceeding the rate of physiological adaptation. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this hypothesis, we incorporate concepts from motor control, neurophysiology, biomechanics, as well as research design and data analysis. We therefore summarize multiple perspectives while proposing theoretical relationships between movement variability and lower extremity overuse injuries. Results: Experimental data are presented and summarized from published experiments examining interactions between experimental task demands and movement variability in the context of drop landing movements, along with comparisons to previous movement variability studies. Conclusion: We provide a conceptual framework for sports medicine researchers interested in predicting and preventing sports injuries. Under performance conditions with greater task demands, we predict reduced trial-to-trial movement variability that could increase the likelihood of overuse injuries.     

A Typology of State Financial Aid Grant Programs Using Latent Class Analysis

Research in Higher Education - State financial aid grant programs are commonly categorized as either need-based, merit-based, or both, but their initial eligibility requirements include many more...     

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.     

Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic cow’s milk, have the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.