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 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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The sociology of Erving Goffman has inspired generations of sociologists throughout the world. Students and scholars alike have in Goffman’s unsurpassable and generous ability to capture the world of everyday life discovered an emporium of useful, incisive and quite often humorous analyses, concepts and ideas. The Contemporary Goffman highlights the continued relevance of Goffman to sociology and related disciplines – to theoretical discussions as well as to substantive empirical ...

Critical Race Theory provides a framework for exploring racism in society, taking into account the role of institutions and drawing on the experiences of those affected. Applied to the world of sport, this framework can reveal the underlying social mores and institutionalised prejudices that have helped perpetuate those racial stereotypes particular to sport, and those that permeate broader society.In this groundbreaking sociological investigation, Kevin Hylton takes on the controv...

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On ...

This innovative book marks a significant departure from tradition anlayses of the evolution of cultural landscapes and the interpretation of past environments. Maps of Meaning proposes a new agenda for cultural geography, one set squarely in the context of contemporary social and cultural theory.Notions of place and space are explored through the study of elite and popular cultures, gender and sexuality, race, language and ideology. Questioning the ways in which we invest ...

In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and ′affirmative feminism′ and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the ′end′ of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-f...