This informative text focuses on the role of sport in U.S. and Canadian societies. The approach is sociological, analytical, and critical.

Product Description: Many sports fans are conflicted—they may love the games, the players, and their communities, but may be alarmed by issues including academic corruption, athlete health, and the overarching emphasis on winning and profit at all costs...read more

Product Description: AVAILABLE NOW!Sports buffs know all about famous players and coaches and can recite statistics in endless detail. But do fans know how sport is linked to other institutions of society? Do they understand the role of sport in socializing youngsters in both positive and negative ways? What about the ways in which sport perpetuates race and gender-role stereotypes in society? How do owners, coaches, and other sport authorities exercise power to maintain control over athletes?These issues and more are examined in this selection of accessible writings by journalists and leading scholars who represent a new era of critical appraisal of sports—both professional and amateur...read more

Product Description: Much of the writing on the post-9/11 period in the United States has focused on the role of "official" Government rhetoric about 9/11. Those who have focused on the news media have suggested that they played a key role in (re)defining the nation, allowing the citizenry to come to terms with 9/11, in providing ‘official’ understandings and interpretations of the event, and setting the terms for a geo-political-military response (the war on terror)...read more

Product Description: Rooting for the Home Team examines how various American communities create and maintain a sense of collective identity through sports. Looking at large cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles as well as small rural towns, suburbs, and college towns, the contributors consider the idea that rooting for local athletes and home teams often symbolizes a community's preferred understanding of itself, and that doing so is an expression of connectedness, public pride and pleasure, and personal identity...read more

Product Description: In 1968, noted sociologist Harry Edwards established the Olympic Project for Human Rights, calling for a boycott of that year's games in Mexico City as a demonstration against racial discrimination in the United States and around the world...read more

Product Description: In an era characterized by news that caters to extreme ends of the political spectrum, sporting events are one of the last refuges to which people of divergent viewpoints can turn. In the days and weeks following a national tragedy, columnists frequently write about how the tragedy has affected the sports world, and how, in turn, particular sporting events have affected the American people as they cope with adversity, loss, and grief; in the process, these columnists often reveal their own definitions of tragedy and being American...read more

Product Description: Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles, Transnational Sport tells how sports shape experiences of global Koreanness, and how those experiences are affected by national cultures. Rachael Miyung Joo focuses on superstar Korean athletes and sporting events produced for transnational media consumption...read more

Product Description: 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...read more