ABSTRACT
Despite sport-related concussion becoming a topic of significant cultural concern over the past decade, first-person knowledge, stories, and ideas from injured persons are not well-represented within the vast body of academic research that has emerged. Drawing on interviews with 16 youth athletes aged 12 to 16 who were in various stages of recovering from a sport-related concussion, this chapter discusses the young athletes’ constructions of the impacts of concussion on their lives. Participants communicated how they experienced simultaneous feelings of interpersonal support and “aloneness,” loss of their identity as athletes, and concern over their future participation in sport. We borrow from and interrogate Michael Bury’s (1980) concept of “biographical disruption” to engage critically with the participants’ narratives, narratives which are influenced by dominant sport and health discourses. The chapter emphasizes the necessity of foregrounding injured persons’ lived experiences as an integral part of concussion knowledge moving forward.
