The digital turn in leisure has opened up a vast array of new opportunities to play, learn, participate and be entertained – opportunities that have transformed what we recognise as leisure. This edited collection provides a significant contribution to our changing understanding of digital leisure cultures, reflecting on the socio-historical context within which the digital age emerged, while engaging with new debates about the evolving and controversial role of digital platforms in contemporary leisure cultures. This book also demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying digital leisure cultures. To make sense of how individuals and institutions use digital spaces it is necessary to draw on history, science and technology, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and geography, as well as sport and leisure studies. This important and timely study discusses both the promise of the digital sphere as a realm of liberation, and the darker side of the internet associated with control, surveillance, exclusion and dehumanisation. Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical perspectives is fascinating reading for any student or scholar of sociology, sport and leisure studies, geography or media studies.
This book examines and establishes the sociological relevance of the concept of populism and illuminates the ideological use of sport, leisure, and popular culture in socio-political populist strategies and dynamics. The first part of the book — Themes, Concepts, Theories — sets the scene by reviewing and evaluating populist themes, concepts, and theories and exploring their cultural-historical roots in and application to cultural forms such as mega-sports events, reality television programmes, and the popular music festival. The second part — National Contexts and Settings — examines populist elements of events and regimes in selected cases in South America and Europe: Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Italy, and England. In the third part — Trump Times — the place of sport in the populist ideology and practices of US president Donald Trump is critically examined in analyses of Trump’s authoritarian populism, his Twitter discourse, Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl, and populist strategy on the international stage. The book concludes with a discussion of the strong case for a fuller sociological engagement with the populist dimensions of sport, leisure, and popular cultural forms. Written in a clear and accessible style, this volume will be of interest to sociologists and social scientists beyond those specialising in popular culture and cultural politics of sport and leisure, as the topic of populism and its connection to popular cultural forms and practices has come increasingly into prominence in the contemporary world.
Through a social justice and equity lens, this book examines how families, sport, and leisure connect to broader social issues in society. It goes beyond describing oppression and disadvantaged identities and focuses on advocacy and ways forward to challenge the status quo. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws upon different theories to present important new work on topics as diverse as the role of parents and siblings within youth sport; the family in sport for development and peace; and grandparent–grandchild relationships in sport, leisure, and family tourism. Several topics also bring attention to the multiplicity of family lives such as LGBTQ older adults as well as children and young people in the care of the state. Together, these studies provide important insight into how sport and leisure reflect and refract key contemporary social issues within the context of familial lives. This is fascinating reading for any student or researcher with an interest in sport, leisure, education, development, sociology, social work, or social policy.
Sports Culture examines individual issues people, artefacts, events and organizations in their historical, social and cultural contexts. Coverage is wide-ranging with more than 170 entries.
"In only 138 pages Schirato manages a broad sweep across sports history and culture... he brings the eye of a critical fan to his analysis of sport, treating it seriously as a social practice and as a social institution... A useful, provocative and non-dogmatic text that should be useful to undergraduate and graduate sport studies programmes." - Malcolm MacLean, Sport in History Understanding Sport Culture traces and analyzes the development of the modern field of sport from its ancient and medieval precursors (the festivals of Greece and Rome, and games such as folk football), through to its inception in the mid-nineteenth century as a set of activities designed to instill character and discipline in students in exclusive British public schools, up to its transformation into a global institution and popular spectacle. The narrative also focuses on and provides a detailed account of the gradual coming together of sport and the media. It explains how this relationship has accentuated sport′s status as one of the most important sites in contemporary culture, while simultaneously threatening its existence. As part of the Understanding Contemporary Culture series this book is aimed at a broad range of students from undergraduate to graduate level, who want to know more and be fully informed on sport, its relationship to the media, and its cultural dynamics.
Reviewers’ comments on the first edition “Marks the coming of age of the academic study of media sport.” Media, Culture & Society “The book is extremely well-written – ideal as a student text, yet also at the forefront of innovation.” International Review of Cultural Studies “A thoroughly worthwhile read and an excellent addition to the growing literature on media sport” Sport, Education and Society Sport, Culture and the Media was the first book to analyse comprehensively two of the most powerful cultural forces of our times: sport and media. It examines the ways in which media sport has established itself in contemporary everyday life, and how sport and media have made themselves mutually dependent. This new edition examines the latest developments in sports media, including: Expanded material on new media sport and technology developments Updated coverage of political economy, including major changes in the ownership of sports broadcasting New scholarship and research on recent sports events like the Olympics and the World Cup, sports television and press, and theoretical developments in areas like globalisation and spectatorship. The first part of the book, “Making Media Sport”, traces the rise of the sports media and the ways in which broadcast and print sports texts are produced, the values and practices of those who produce them, and the economic and political influences on and implications of 'the media sports cultural complex'. The second part, “Unmaking the Media Sports Text”, concentrates on different media forms – television, still photography, news reporting, film, live commentary, creative sports writing and new media sports technologies.This is a key textbook for undergraduate studies in culture and media, sociology, sport and leisure studies, communication, race, ethnicity and gender.
2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways. In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological. By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.
This exciting, accessible introduction to the field of Sports Studies is the most comprehensive guide yet to the relationships between sport, culture and society. Taking an international perspective, Sport, Culture and Society provides students with the insight they need to think critically about the nature of sport, and includes: a clear and comprehensive structure unrivalled coverage of the history, culture, media, sociology, politics and anthropology of sport coverage of core topics and emerging areas extensive original research and new case study material. The book offers a full range of features to help guide students and lecturers, including essay topics, seminar questions, key definitions, extracts from primary sources, extensive case studies, and guides to further reading. Sport, Culture and Society represents both an important course resource for students of sport and also sets a new agenda for the social scientific study of sport.
This text is written especially for sport management students to examine the wider social and cultural environment and to fully explain the key issues and practical implications for everyday sport management.
