Érudit's RSS Feed

Editors’ Introduction to the Issue

Kate Bedford, Emma Casey, Fiona Nicoll, Tina Sang, Sylvia Kairouz, Eva Monson, Annie-Claude Savard and Martin French

Solidarity and Chance: Ethnographic Insights from an Italian Bingo Hall

Marco Manzocchi, Beatrice Galbignani, Sofia Lanfranchi, Marco Romito and Giorgio Michele Zanutto
As in many other countries, bingo in Italy occupies a peculiar status: it exists in a gray area between the image of pathological gambling and a harmless pastime for the elderly. This marginal position within public gambling offers an opportunity to study the phenomenon beyond the pathological narrative. Through a team ethnography conducted in a bingo hall in Milan, we explored how practices of chance-taking intertwine with social dynamics of solidarity. Our observations reveal that engagement with chance—often through repeated losses—fosters a sense of shared fate among players, reinforced by collective superstitions and ritual behaviors that transform gaming tables into spaces of communal emotion. Individual wins become collective celebrations through ritualized redistribution of money, while losses are softened by mutual recognition and complaint. These practices create emotional bonds, particularly among marginalized groups. In this article, we interweave diary-like narrative reflections with theoretical analysis and contextualize our findings within Italy’s gambling regulatory framework. Our aim is to restore dignity to bingo players, emphasizing the hall not merely as a site of consumption, but also as a space where social ties and emotional solidarities emerge and are sustained.

Foreign Population and Gambling: Perceptions and Cultural Conditioning: A Qualitative Study in the Area of the Metropolitan City of Milan

Fabio Lucchini, Eliana Gabellini and Corrado Celata
This paper focuses on the culturally mediated perception of gambling among immigrant communities in the Health Protection Agency of Milan area, and its consequences in terms of health promotion, prevention, and possible access to treatment. Pursuing a gender-balanced approach, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of foreign cultural associations in the area of Milan, involving the six most numerous communities (Egyptian, Romanian, Filipino, Chinese, Peruvian and Albanian). A textual and thematic analysis of the emerging content was conducted following the grounded theory approach and considering the complex interplay between agency and structural constraints. From the interpretation of the categories and macro-categories identified, it emerges how the perceptions of gambling and gambling disorder (GD) by the foreign communities considered are culturally conditioned, raising questions about the role of family and community in relation to individual agent. This highlights the desirability of outlining culturally sensitive health promotion, prevention and treatment programs that can impact risk behaviors and possibly facilitate the seeking of professional help.

Gender in Gambling Research or Gender Research in Gambling? An Intersectional Socio-Constructionist Approach

Sylvia Kairouz, Abu Saleh Mohammad Sowad, Lesley Lambo, Zara Saeidzadeh and Adèle Morvannou
A scoping review by Kairouz et al. (2023) on the conceptualization of gender in peer-reviewed gambling scholarship (2000–2020) found that only 58 of 2,532 articles addressed gender as a sociocultural construct. Building on that review, this paper examines how these 58 studies discuss gender as a sociocultural construct. Using a feminist social constructionist lens, we analyzed gambling practices and gamblers' experiences to understand how gender is represented and theorized. Through thematic content analysis, we discovered that only 39 of the 58 articles use sociocultural conceptualizations of gender when discussing gamblers' identities and lived experiences. Our analysis identifies three dominant themes illustrating how gender is constructed in gambling research: gender binary roles, men's domination, and gambling-related harms against women. While feminist qualitative research in gambling studies is growing, we argue that gender-focused scholarship remains constrained by binary frameworks, limited intersectional engagement, and insufficient attention to structural inequalities. Consequently, gambling research tends to reproduce unequal gendered power relations while overlooking the broader social factors shaping gamblers' experiences. We call for more nuanced analyses of gendered social relations, at intersections with sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and (dis)ability to develop more effective measures for harm prevention and support.

Betting as Survival, Not Recreation: A West African Critique of Individualized Responsible Gambling Tools

Chimezie Obinna Odionye
This commentary critiques the application of individualized responsible gambling (RG) tools, as advanced in recent psychological research by Michael J. A. Wohl and colleagues, within the context of Nigeria’s sports betting landscape. Drawing on their work on voluntary pre-commitment, feedback mechanisms like the Positive Play Quiz, and cognitive models such as the illusion of control, the piece argues that these interventions, rooted in Western recreational paradigms, function as a neoliberal veil in West Africa. In Nigeria, where youth unemployment rates are reported at around 23% amid economic crises (with official figures controversially lower at 6.5% due to methodological changes), betting is framed as a survival strategy rather than leisure. RG tools overlook structural drivers like poverty, aggressive fintech marketing, and capital extraction by global operators. With over 60 million Nigerians betting daily and the sports betting market projected at $1.64 billion USD in 2025 (rising to broader gambling revenues of up to $3.63 billion), harms extend beyond addiction to deepened inequality. The commentary calls for decolonizing harm prevention through structural reforms, including mandatory operator taxes specifically earmarked to fund local mental health research and indigenous gambling harm prevention studies. It urges a contextualized paradigm that prioritizes structural accountability and economic desperation over individual agency.