INQ-260SO | Sport and Culture

Full Title: Sport and Culture

Topic Description:

What does sport reveal about culture? By turn, how does awareness of culture contribute to our understanding of sport? What are the relationships between sport and religion, between sport and social inequality, between sport and social change? How are subcultures and countercultures expressed by and embedded in sport? These and related questions are explored from the perspective of the Sociological Imagination (C. Wright Mills), an approach which emphasizes social structure and critical theory. Specific topics consider sport in contexts of collective identity, innovation, cultural contradiction and cultural resistance, and ever-predominating media spectacle. Case studies will draw from documentaries on basketball recruiting (“Hoop Dreams”) and soccer hooliganism (“Green Street”), as well as from an in-depth ethnographic study of baseball in the Dominican Republic (Sugarball).

Counts as Global? No

Topic Approved: April 2010