Learning Culture through Sports: Exploring the Role of Sports in Society - Tapa dura

A remarkably useful and versatile contribution to the field of sport sociology that has the added benefit of resonating across a range of disciplines. These essays manage to address themes with direct relevance to fields as diverse as history, education, psychology, gender studies, anthropology, and political science. And they do so without losing focus on what makes this such a necessary collection in the first place: The sheer power of sports culture to shape social constructions of gender, race, sexual orientation, and nationality. But perhaps most impressive is how the editors have managed to explore these dynamics by connecting social structures to people's everyday, lived experiences. -- Jackson Katz, co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program and creator of the critically acclaimed film Tough Guise: Violenc The essays are solid, and they challenge the reader to think about and reflect on social constructs and their relationships with sport and society. * CHOICE * Young people already know that organized sports-whether they love them or hate them-are an important part of their lives. Sports are a multi-billion dollar business that saturates the mass media; young peoples' clothes are splattered with swooshes and team logos; school activities and annual year books point to sport's centrality in the social life of schools. So it is fitting that Sandra Spickard Prettyman and Brian Lampman have assembled a collection of fascinating articles from some of the top scholars of sport. Teachers and students alike will find that this text, like no other, illuminates previously taken-for-granted, yet centrally important issues in their daily lives. -- Cheng Chen, professor of sociology and gender studies, University of Southern California, and author of Taking the Field: Women, Men and Spo

This book provides coaches, educators, parents, and others dealing with students and athletes with an engaging and critical venue by which to examine contemporary issues and controversies surrounding sport. In this text, authors take up the challenges faced by sport in our world, especially as it relates to the lives of young people, providing multiple perspectives on the issues, problems, and possibilities of sport in contemporary American society.