A powerful cultural critique of soccer’s public rhetoricAmerican sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for cultural, social, and political possibility. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sports largely avoid any political stance other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John M. Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in Am...

The incarcerated in America's cultural imagination.The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1...

A bold rethinking of public discourse, Public Modalities explores how people shape civic life through protest, media, and identity in an ever-evolving public sphere.This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of “the public” or “public life,” and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map var...

Taking up the charge to study discourses of marginalized groups, while simultaneously extending scholarship about Latina/os in the field of Communication, Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? provides the most current work examining the vernacular voices of Latina/os. The editors of this diverse collection structure the book along four topics-Locating Foundations, Citizenship and Belonging, The Politics of Self-Representation, and Trans/National Voces

Using personal accounts from star players, interviews with sport insiders and striking photographs, On the Edge provides a dramatic look into the business and politics of women's hockey.

In contemporary North America, figure skating ranks among the most 'feminine' of sports and few boys take it up for fear of being labelled effeminate or gay. Yet figure skating was once an exclusively male pastime - women did not skate in significant numbers until the late 1800s, at least a century after the founding of the first skating club. Only in the 1930s did figure skating begin to acquire its feminine image.Artistic Impressions is the first history to trace figure ...

In Knowing the Score, philosopher David Papineau uses sports to illuminate some of modern philosophy's most perplexing questions. As Papineau demonstrates, the study of sports clarifies, challenges, and sometimes confuses crucial issues in philosophy. The tactics of road bicycle racing shed new light on questions of altruism, while sporting family dynasties reorient the nature v. nurture debate. Why do sports competitors choke? Why do fans think God will favor their team over thei...

Contributors include Julian Ammirante (Laurentian University at Georgian) Jason Blake (University of Ljubljana Slovenia) Robert Dennis (Queen's University) Jamie Dopp (University of Victoria) Russell Field (University of Manitoba) Greg Gillespie (Brock University) Richard Harrison (Mount Royal College) Craig Hyatt (Brock University) Brian Kennedy (Pasadena City College) Karen E.H. Skinazi (University of Alberta) and Julie Stevens (Brock University).From the book:The Giller Prize-winning ...

Essential reading for soccer fans as the 2022 World Cup approaches, this lively and lyrical book is "an ideal guide to the world's most popular sport" (Simon Kuper, coauthor of Soccernomics).Soccer is not only the world's most popular game; it's also one of the most widely shared forms of global culture. The Language of the Game is a passionate and engaging introduction to soccer's history, tactics, and human drama. Profiling soccer's full cast of...

The globalizing influence of professional sportsProfessional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the ...

Global sporting events involve the creation, management and mediation of cultural meanings for consumption by massive media audiences. The apotheosis of this cultural form is the Olympic Games. This challenging and provocative new book explores the Olympic spectacle, from the multi-media bidding process and the branding and imaging of the Games, to security, surveillance and control of the Olympic product across all of its levels.The book argues that the process of commercializatio...

The Olympics: The Basics is an accessible, contemporary introduction to the Olympic movement and Games. Chapters explain how the Olympics transcend sports, engaging us with a range of contemporary philosophical, social, cultural and political matters, including:peace development and diplomacymanagement and economicscorruption, terror and activismthe rise of human enhancementethics and environmentalism.This book e...