This book takes a critical look at how leisure and sport intersect with crime and harm. Bringing together leading scholars in criminology, sociology, sport science, social work and psychology, it shows how recreational and elite sporting spaces can foster prosocial development but also generate significant social inequalities and injustices.Through diverse empirical cases - including sexual abuse in sport, environmental harms at mega-events, performance enhancing drugs, athlete cri...

This book offers a timely and critical exploration of leisure and forced migration from multiple disciplinary perspectives, spanning sociology, gender studies, migration studies and anthropology. It engages with perspectives and experiences that unsettle and oppose dehumanising and infantilising binaries surrounding forced migrants in contemporary society.The book presents cutting edge research addressing three inter-related themes: spaces and temporalities; displaced bodies and in...

Written by experienced academics used to teaching the subject this book will help students and researchers find their way within the diverse field of sport studies. Clear, well researched entries explain the key concepts in the debates surrounding the social significance and social dynamics of sport. Each entry provides:• Clear Definitions• Relevant Examples• Up-to-date Suggestions for Further Reading• Informative Cross-ReferencingValuable in its par...

This edited book aims to capture the functioning of human rights and civil activism at the level of the relationships between the individual and the social, and in relation to abuses, contestations, and transformations. Chapters cover the ways human rights are denied, articulated, and not realised. Mega-events, either sporting or otherwise (e.g. Gay Pride), tend to be the focus of this inquiry, although there are important contributions on grassroots non-governmental organisations. Overall...

This innovative text's critical examination foregrounds the prime reason why so many people participate in or watch sport – pleasure. Although there has been a "turn" to emotions and affect within academia over the last two decades, it has been somewhat remiss that pleasure, as an integral aspect of human life, has not received greater attention from sociologists of sport, exercise and physical education. This book addresses this issue via an unabashed examination of sport and the moving b...

This book examines the complex ways in which girls and women experience football cultures in Britain. It extends current debate surrounding women and football (namely, how gender has functioned to shape women’s experiences of playing the game), by focusing on organisational, administrative and coaching practices, alongside the particular issues surrounding sexuality, ethnicity and disability (not only gender).The book analyses football and gender to reveal the subtle forms of discr...

This handbook provides an original, comprehensive and unparalleled overview of feminist scholarship in sport, leisure and physical education. It captures the complexities of past, current and future developments in feminism while highlighting its theoretical, methodological and empirical applications. It also critically engages with policy and practice issues for women and girls taking part in sport and leisure pursuits and in physical education provision.The Palgrave Handbook ...

The first book focusing exclusively on this subject, Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory captures the newest and best writing on an emerging focus of study that brings in perspectives from a number of disciplines including sports studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies. An accessible introduction to this dynamic field, this is an explorative analysis of lesbian, gay, transgender, transsexual and intersex people’s experiences...

In recent years, questions about men and boys have aroused remarkable media interest, public concern and controversy. Across the world, health services are noticing the relevance of men’s gender to problems as diverse as road accidents, diet and sexually transmitted disease. Teachers are increasingly preoccupied with the poor educational performance of boys, and criminologists have begun to explore why men and boys continue to dominate the crime statistics.In this timely new volume...

Why are sport and exercise important?What can the study of sport and exercise tell us about wider society?Who holds the power in creating contemporary sport and exercise discourses?It is impossible to properly understand the role that sport and exercise play in contemporary society without knowing a little social theory. It is social theory that provides the vocabulary for our study of society, that helps us ask the rig...

Gender issues continue to be a prominent concern of academics and policy-makers, and increasingly arise in various forms to be debated in the public sphere and popular media. But what exactly do we mean by gender? How can we best understand gender differences? How are current gender relations changing? What new paths are ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ taking? What would it be like to live in a society in which differences of gender were transcended?In this new edition of her popula...

This important new book brings together gender studies and sexuality studies to provide original and critical insights into processes of identity formation in a wide range of sport-related contexts. The authors draw on contemporary debates concerning gender and identity from a range of disciplines including sociology, social and cultural geography, media studies and management studies, to address key issues in masculinity, femininity and sexuality:Part 1: Representi...