In this book, Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America’s favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country’s most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which colle...

This innovative collection convincingly argues that modern sport can be characterized by unequal and problematic power relations that are inextricably linked to issues of violence, harm, deviance, and punishment.On the one hand, sport is a mainstay of community building, an expression of solidarity, and a means to mental and social health. On the other, there is the star player who commits sexual violence, the trans athlete whose achievements are dismissed as fraudulent, or the rac...

Although service outsourcing has spread throughout Canada’s prisons and jails, into its police, courts, and national security institutions, and along the border in recent decades, the expanding scope and pace of corporate involvement in criminal justice functions has not been closely investigated.Changing of the Guards provides a comprehensive assessment of privatization and private influence across the twenty-first-century Canadian criminal justice system. It illuminates ...

In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see gender equality in sports.The chapter...

Winner of the NASSS Outstanding Book AwardHockey and multiculturalism are often noted as defining features of Canadian culture; yet, rarely are we forced to question the relationship and tensions between these two social constructs. This book examines the growing significance of hockey in Canada’s South Asian communities. The Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi broadcast serves as an entry point for a broader consideration of South Asian experiences in hockey c...

In today's culture, sports wield a weight influence; this influence, however, is rarely examined. Similar to the first edition, this second edition of Learning Culture Through Sports provides coaches, educators, parents, and others dealing with students and athletes with an engaging and critical context for probing the sociological basis of this influence. The book's sections each address a particular issue in sport: youth and sport; gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; sport, media, ...

In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls’ and women’s dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of s...

Overcoming the Neutral Zone Trap challenges hockey’s norms, pushes its boundaries, and provides new ways of conceptualizing its role in North American culture. The editors of this engaging interdisciplinary collection use the metaphor of the neutral zone trap to explore the ways that hockey’s culture and structures work to exclude marginalized people. The book features both personal and scholarly accounts of agents of change—people, ideas, and events—that confront the challenges associated...

What does it mean when a hit that knocks an American football player unconscious is cheered by spectators? What are the consequences of such violence for the participants of this sport and for the entertainment culture in which it exists? This book brings together scholars and sport commentators to examine the relationship between American football, violence and the larger relations of power within contemporary society.From high school and college to the NFL, Football, Culture,...

Read award-winning journalist Frank Bruni's New York Times bestseller: an inspiring manifesto about everything wrong with today's frenzied college admissions process and how to make the most of your college years.Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, preceded by test prep, tutors, all sorts of stratagems, all kinds of rankings, and a conviction among too many young people...

**“Get your head out of your phone and stop doomscrolling. Read Let Us Play instead.”—Jay Onrait, sports anchor“A crucial playbook that athletes and nonathletes alike can use to help make sports an inclusive place for all.”—Meghan Duggan, 3-time Olympian and Olympic gold medalist, USA Women’s Hockey“Will shed light on the unique challenges trans athletes face.”—Chris Mosier, transgender athlete and activistA crucial subversion of the misconceptions around t...

In this new edition of his acclaimed book, Richard Giulianotti provides a critical sociological interpretation of modern sport. As global festivals such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup demonstrate, sport’s social, political, economic and cultural significance is becoming ever more apparent across the world.Ten years after its original publication, the text has been completely revised and updated to cover the most recent literature and to tackle the key contemporary is...