This book helps young black males, educators, policy makers, parents, and all other interested parties to understand the importance of education alongside athletic pursuits. In the world today, many young black males view athletic participation as the way to secure a successful future. Yet for the majority of them, dreams of playing professional sports rarely pan out. Many end up returning to a life of poverty as a result of the sports lure which deceives them and entices them to focus exclusively on athletic talent at the expense of their education. This book presents a social historical and critical deconstruction introducing readers to this sports lure, revealing what makes it so powerful in the lives of these youths. As Isabel Ann Dwornik documents, centuries-worth of racism in the United States is at the core of this phenomenon, which has affected the academic identity development of black male youths and has discouraged them from taking full advantage of their schooling.

1954,A triumphant season for black ballplayers and the countryaward-winning New York Times bestselling author Bill Madden delivers the first major book to fully examine the 1954 baseball season, drawn largely from exclusive recent interviews with the major players themselves, including Willie Mays and Larry Doby as well as New York baseball legends from that era: Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford of the Yankees, Monte Irvin of the Giants, and Carl Erskine of the Dodgers. 1954 transports readers across the baseball landscape of the time as future superstars such as Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and others entered the leagues and continued to integrate the sport. Weaving together the narrative of one of baseball's greatest seasons wit the racially charged events of that year,the same in which the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of the races be outlawed in America's public schools, 1954 demonstrates how our national pastime was actually ahead of the curve in terms of the acceptance of black Americans, while the nation at large continued to struggle with tolerance.

This worldwide study examines how religion gets into theme parks - as mission, as an aspect of culture, as fable, and by chance. Gods and Rollercoasters analyses religion in theme parks, looking at how it relates to modernism, popular culture, right-wing politics, nationalism, and the rise of the global middle class. Crispin Paine argues that religion has discovered a major new means of expression through theme parks. From the reconstruction of Biblical Jerusalem at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, through the world of Chinese mythology at Haw Par Villa in Singapore, to the great temple/theme park Akshardham in New Delhi, this book shows how people are encountering and experiencing religion in the context of fun, thrills and leisure time. Drawing on examples from six of the seven continents, and exploring religious traditions including Christianity, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, Gods and Rollercoasters provides a significant contribution to the study of religion, sociology, anthropology, and popular culture.

What is leisure? How does leisure relate to leading a good life? This critical and intelligent study interrogates the basic principles of leisure and demonstrates the continuing relevance of these questions for our society today. It not only explores the traditional philosophical concepts at the heart of leisure studies, but also pursues new possibilities for reconceptualising leisure that have emerged from recent developments in society, technology and the broader discipline of philosophy itself. Approaching leisure from a philosophically inquisitive perspective, the book argues that leisure revolves around the pursuit of happiness, human flourishing and well-being, making it both a state of mind and a state of being. Its exploration of the meaning of leisure addresses key issues such as identity, ethics, spirituality, human experience, freedom, technology, embodiment, well-being, the fundamental properties of leisure and the challenge of offering a meaningful definition. Revitalising the subject of leisure studies with its originality, Philosophy of Leisure: Foundations of the Good Life is fascinating reading for all students and scholars of leisure studies, philosophy, sociology, psychology and ethics.

This is the first book to consider the intersections of sport, international development and environmental sustainability. It explores the tensions between sport's potential contribution to the environment and its rather poor record to date. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars who approach the topic from various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, the book provides both critical and optimistic perspectives on the place of sport in sustainable development. Chapters examine and question how and whether sport contributes to sustainable development on an international scale. Attention is also paid to the place and role of Indigenous knowledge in sustainable Sport for Development, particularly as an alternative to modernization and/or in support of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Sport, Development and Environmental Sustainability is important reading for academic researchers, students and policy-makers in the fields of kinesiology, sport studies, sport sociology, leisure studies, sport management, sport media, physical cultural studies, environmental studies and sustainability and international development studies.

This book brings together different perspectives of mega-event bidding, hosting and legacies. Their impact is considered through an international range of mega-events in terms of land use, political and socio-economic change, and the placemaking processes that accompany these area-based regeneration projects. From city-regions that have not been successful or withdrawn from mega-event selection, to contemporary Olympic, Football World Cup and Expo host cities whose legacy is still unfolding, to event sites whose legacy is now established, the global appeal of the mega-event is apparent from this collection. The book interrogates the mega-event phenomenon in ten countries, from North and South America, and Australia, to Western and Eastern Europe. Drawing on their historical evolution and antecedents, and following recurrent themes of urban regeneration and resistance, the book highlights the importance of major events and festivals to the creation and marketing of place through branding and regional growth In considering a range of mega-events critically and in different national and geopolitical contexts, the book will be of interest to policy and decision-makers at local, regional, national and international levels, and will be of particular interest to professionals, scholars and students working in planning, urban studies, sport and leisure studies, and in event and festival management.

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape - from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.

This book explores the meanings and practices of vintage lives. It focuses on the non-mainstream subculture of vintage clothes and lifestyle, specifically that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and asks how those engaged in the culture place themselves within the gendered and classed contexts of these eras. As a result, it also identifies the tensions involved in these identities connected to a past that offered little gain for women and narrow gender roles for both women and men. Modern Vintage Homes & Leisure Lives is based on original empirical international data about a group of people who wear vintage clothing all of the time and whose homes are styled entirely, or almost entirely, vintage. It aims to understand the meanings of vintage for them through their daily practices and accrued knowledge. Through interviews and direct observations of vintage events it also explores questions about the acquisition, display and curation of vintage clothes, homes and objects, about glamour and wardrobes, about the history of second-hand markets, and emotional durability and ideas about ghosts, hauntings and spectral remains. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of gender and women's studies, fashion and design, fashion history, cultural studies, the body and embodiment.

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape - from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.

This book brings together a collection of critical essays that challenge the existing dogma of leisure as an unmitigated social good, in order to examine the commodification and marketisation of leisure across a number of key sites. Leisure and consumer culture have become symbolic of the individual freedoms of liberal society, ostensibly presenting individuals with the opportunity to display individual creativity, cultural competence and taste. This book problematizes these assertions, and considers the range of harms that emerge in a consumer society predicated upon intense individualism and symbolic competition. Approaching the field of commodified leisure through the lens of social harm, this collection of essays pushes far beyond criminology's traditional interest in 'deviant' forms of leisure, to consider the normalized social, interpersonal and environmental harms that emerge at the intersection of leisure and consumer capitalism. Capturing the current vitality and interdisciplinary scope of recent work which is underpinned by the deviant leisure perspective, this collection uses case studies, original research and other forms of empirical enquiry to scrutinise activities that range from alcohol consumption and gambling, to charity tourism; CrossFit training; and cosmetic pharmaceuticals. Drawn from researchers across the UK, US, Europe and Australia, Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm represents the first systematic attempt at a criminological consideration of the global harms of the leisure industry; firmly establishing leisure as a subject of serious criminological importance.

Defining Sport: Conceptions and Borderlines is not about the variations of usage of the term "sport." It is about the concept, the range of activities in the world that we unite into one idea-sport. It is through the project of defining sport that we can come to understand these activities better, how they are similar or different, and how they relate to other human endeavors. This definitional inquiry, and the deeper appreciation and apprehension of sport that follows, is the core of this volume. Part I examines several of the standard and influential approaches to defining sport. Part II uses these approaches to examine various challenging borderline cases. These chapters examine the interplay of the borderline cases with the definition and provide a more thorough and clearer understanding of both the definition and the given cases. This work is not meant to be the definitive or exhaustive account of sport. It is meant to inspire further thought and debate on just what sport is; how it relates to other activities and human endeavors; and what we can learn about ourselves through the study of sport. This book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy of sport, history, communications, sociology, psychology, sports management, cultural studies, and physical education.

Can activism be considered a leisure activity? Can the Occupy movement, local campaigns for change and lone acts of personal resistance be understood as events? Within the field of Events Management the content of events is generally analyzed within three categories-culture, sport or business. Such a typology can be helpful as a heuristic for interpretation and analysis within a commercial paradigm. However, this framework overlooks and depoliticizes a significant variety of events, those more accurately construed as protest. Protests as Events is the first book to explore activism as a leisure activity and protests as events; using a fresh interpretation of event to develop a new critical politics of events and leisure. Bringing together a range of cutting edge research from around the world, it explores a variety of protests through the lens of events studies and leisure in order to understand how the study of events management might be conceptualized in the protest space.

If you attend a soccer match in Buenos Aires of the local Atlanta Athletic Club, you will likely hear the rival teams chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This is because the neighborhood of Villa Crespo has long been considered a Jewish district, and its soccer team, "Club Atletico Atlanta," has served as an avenue of integration into Argentine culture. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Raanan Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America.
Since the Second World War, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta soccer club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentines. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now, it is nothing less than family tradition for third generation Jewish Argentines to support "Atlanta." The soccer club has also constituted one of the few spaces where both Jews and non-Jews, affiliated Jews and non-affiliated Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, have interacted. The result has been an active shaping of the local culture by Jewish Latin Americans to their own purposes.
Offering a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants, "Futbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina" represents a pioneering study of the intersection between soccer, ethnicity, and identity in Latin America and makes a major contribution to Jewish History, Latin American History, and Sports History.

Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Global and Universal Contexts is concerned with wider, international applications of language to sport. Topics discussed range from women's volleyball uniforms, ballroom dancing, female athletes as victims, soccer fans, nudity debates, homophobia, misogyny, Title IX, NASCAR, extreme sports, and trekking, to Japanese sports reports, Canadian hockey, sailors in the French press, British portrayals of Wimbledon champs, Australian heroes, German sports editorials, and masculinity relative to Mount Everest.

In recent years, sport has attracted considerable attention as an effective means of combating such local and global issues as war and conflict, poverty, ethnic reconciliation, and gender conflicts. Sport has been shown to be an effective tool or triggering device compared to the other development sectors, especially when donors can apply grassroots activities to the development contexts in thoughtful and continuing ways. This book fills the gap in this critical topic- that will only grow more important as governments, sport and national organizations direct more funds towards forms of play, PE and sport in the hope that these will represent one way of coalescing communities and assist development and peace. This volume is part of the early serious and systematic inquiry into this issue. In addition to showcasing some of the most recognized names in the research subfield of Sociology of Sport, the book draws upon an international roster of global contributors. The empirical focus of the chapters spans from Africa to Asia. Further, these chapters represent three groups - theory and philosophy, empirical research in actual 'on-the-ground' case studies, and those using circumspection and care to construct cases regarding measurement and evaluation.

Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism. The first volume of this two-volume collection considers a broad range of national cultural policies from European and North American countries, and examines the strengthening of international and transnational art worlds in music, visual arts, film, and television. The chapters cover cultural policy and political culture in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, the Balkans, and Slovenia, and address the extent to which Western nations have shifted from welfare-state to market-based ideologies. Tensions between centres and peripheries in global art worlds are considered, as well as complex interactions between nations and international and transnational art worlds, and regional variations in the audiovisual market. Both volumes provide students and scholars across a range of disciplines with an incisive, comparative overview of the politics of art and culture and national, international and transnational art worlds in contemporary capitalism.

Sport and the Home Front contributes in significant and original ways to our understanding of the social and cultural history of the Second World War. It explores the complex and contested treatment of sport in government policy, media representations and the everyday lives of wartime citizens. Acknowledged as a core component of British culture, sport was also frequently criticised, marginalised and downplayed, existing in a constant state of tension between notions of normality and exceptionality, routine and disruption, the everyday and the extraordinary. The author argues that sport played an important, yet hitherto neglected, role in maintaining the morale of the British people and providing a reassuring sense of familiarity at a time of mass anxiety and threat. Through the conflict, sport became increasingly regarded as characteristic of Britishness; a symbol of the 'ordinary' everyday lives in defence of which the war was being fought. Utilised to support the welfare of war workers, the entertainment of service personnel at home and abroad and the character formation of schoolchildren and young citizens, sport permeated wartime culture, contributing to new ways in which the British imagined the past, present and future. Using a wide range of personal and public records - from diary writing and club minute books to government archives - this book breaks new ground in both the history of the British home front and the history of sport.

Sporting mega-events habitually spawn protests from local groups discommoded by the building of new infrastructure, environmental lobbies contesting the long-term legacies of such events, and expressions of outrage at the expenditure of public funds on events often restricted to an elite selection of participants and spectators. Are these protest movements ever successful in preventing sporting events from taking place or in modifying their nature, or even in drawing attention to social issues? Or are they inevitably destined to be ignored in the popular fervour and financial windfall that accompanies such events? Similarly, sporting events have occasionally been the site of iconic moments of political protest. Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' 'Black Power' salute at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, for example, remains one of the abiding symbols of resistance to oppression expressed in a sporting context. What is it about sport that lends itself to these kinds of protests? Are these protests effective in accelerating change in society or does the sporting context ultimately serve to trivialize important social issues? Here we endeavour to respond to some of these questions and thereby illuminate the evolving political, economic, environmental and cultural implications of sport in society. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in The International Journal of The History of Sport.

This book presents an ethnographic description and sociological interpretation of the 'football gatherings' that evolved out of central Romania in the late twentieth century. In the 1980's, Romanian public television did not broadcast football mega-events for economic and political reasons. In response, masses of people would leave their homes and travel into the mountains to pick-up the TV broadcast from neighbouring countries. The phenomenon grew into a social institution with a penetrating force: it produced an alternative social space and a dissident public that pointed to a form of resistance taking place through football. Forbidden Football in Ceausescu's Romania provides an insight into the everyday life under the pressure of dictatorship and, through the special patterns of sports consumption, it tells a social history through small individual stories related to football.

Football fans and football culture represent a unique prism through which to view contemporary society and politics. Based on in-depth empirical research into football in Poland, this book examines how fans develop political identities and how those identities can influence the wider political culture. It surveys the turbulent history of Poland in recent decades and explores the dominant right-wing ideology on the terraces, characterised by nationalism, 'traditional' values and anti-immigrant sentiment. As one of the first book-length studies of fandom in Eastern Europe, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of society and politics in post-Communist states. Politics, Ideology and Football Fandom is an important read for students and researchers studying sport, politics and identity, as well as those working in sports studies and political studies covering sociology of sport, globalisation studies, East European politics, ethnic studies, social movements studies, political history and nationalism studies.

Modern roller derby has been theorised as a gendered leisure context, offering women opportunities for empowerment and growth, and enabling them to carve a space for themselves in sport. No longer a women-only sport, roller derby is now played by all genders and has been heralded as a model of inclusivity within sport. Identity, Belonging, and Community in Men's Roller Derby offers an insight into how men's roller derby culture is created and maintained, how members forge an identity for themselves and their team, and how they create feelings of belonging and inclusivity. Through in-depth ethnographic study of a specific, localised roller derby community, this book examines how practices of skills capital intersect with different configurations of masculinity in a continual struggle between traditional and inclusive models of sport. An interrogation of the ways a DIY sport can be seen to be achieved, experienced, and understood in everyday practice, this book will appeal to scholars of men, masculinities, and sport. Additionally, the methodological discussions will be of value to ethnographers and researchers who have had to deal with a disruptive presence.

Clare Holdsworth develops an account of everyday busyness by identifying busyness with a relational interpretation of time. She analyses a variety of secondary data sources - one-day diaries, self-help books on busyness and time management, accounts of a writing day and interviews about family work and time - and combines these analyses with personal observations. By revealing busyness as the point at which we negotiate our own responsibilities and those of other people, and by showcasing how experiences of busyness are very varied, Holdsworth concludes that the tactics we use to deal with excessive busyness and the habits we develop in relation to it need to recognise the relational status of busyness. Rather than assuming that busyness is an issue that should be resolved by helping individuals manage their time better, she argues that busyness should be thought of as a collective challenge. This book encourages us to understand that time-management solutions need to focus on the spatial and temporal distributions of responsibilities and how people manage these responsibilities. It represents a timely call for collective responses to busyness in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has intensified the unequal distribution of responsibilities.

This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of British football as depicted on film. From early single-camera silents to its current multi-screen mediations, the repeated treatment of football in British cinema points to the game's importance not only in the everyday rhythms of national life but also, and especially, its immutable place in the British imaginary landscape. Through close textual analysis together with production and reception histories, this book explores the ways in which professional footballers, amateur players and supporters (the devoted and the demonized) have been represented on the British screen. As well as addressing the joys and sorrows the game necessarily engenders, British football is shown to function as an accessible structure to explore wider issues such as class, race, gender and even the whole notion of 'Britishness'.

Research on Indigenous participation in sport offers many opportunities to better understand the political issues of equality, empowerment, self-determination and protection of culture and identity. This volume compares and conceptualises the sociological significance of Indigenous sports in different international contexts. The contributions, all written by Indigenous scholars and those working directly in Indigenous/Native Studies units, provide unique studies of contemporary experiences of Indigenous sports participation. The papers investigate current understandings of Indigeneity found to circulate throughout sports, sports organisations and Indigenous communities. by (1): situating attitudes to racial and cultural difference within the broader sociological processes of post colonial Indigenous worlds (2): interrogating perceptions of Indigenous identity with reference to contemporary theories of identity drawn from Indigenous Studies and (3): providing insight to increased Indigenous participation, empowerment and personal development through sport with reference to sociological theory.

This edited collection explores Positive Sociology of Leisure (PSL) as a subfield relating to leisure studies, sociology of leisure, and sociology of happiness. Defined as an area of research that examines social aspects of leisure life with a focus on the optimal functioning of relationship, group, community, organization, and other social units, PSL differs from more critical forms of sociology in that its starting point is social positives. The contributions draw on a range of diverse disciplinary backgrounds to consider various meanings of leisure across themes such as: ageing; sex, sexuality and family; community, youth, and education; and arts and creativity. Positive Sociology of Leisure will be a key reference within the field of sociology of leisure, as well as an important introductory book for those interested in leisure studies.