A Companion to Sport

From the paternal bonding ritual of a baseball thrown to a small gloved hand, to the shared anxiety and elation of a football crowd, sport has long been a central element of cultures throughout the world. It brings together communities, nations and people with little else in common, whether as an activity or a spectacle, operating as a vital form of human expression.

Yet despite its importance as a means of understanding social formations and interpersonal relations, sport has often been viewed by social scientists as a marginal activity. This wide-ranging collection of essays aims to address this inconsistency, exploring the ways in which sport has been marked by the discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality and nation which inform the structure and experience of wider society.

Both theoretically ambitious and accessible, A Companion to Sport includes the thoughts of well-known social and cultural theorists whose works lends itself to an interrogation of sport, as well as a number of leading theorists on the subject of sport itself. It is an invaluable extension to the field, and is set to become a default text for anyone interested in contemporary cultural forms and their political significance.