Understanding Sports Culture

Tony Schirato teaches and researches in the areas of cultural theory, media literacy, and sport and the media. He has co-authored books on the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, and also on communication and cultural literacy, globalisation, Asian cultural politics and visual culture. His most recent book is on sports culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on the work of gender theorist Judith Butler.

Introduction Playing Sport Theories of Play, Games and Sport Intimations of Sport The Field of Sport Global Sport Sport, the Media and Spectatorship From Sport to Spectacle Contemporary Sport

A particular strength of Understanding Sports Culture is the author's ability to meet the claim for breadth of student readership. The book is clearly structured, flagging from the outset a journey from ancient sporting times and the assumed human need of play to the development of modern and ultimately global and highly commercialized sporting cultures. His theoretical interruptions of the historical narrative are not only pertinent but elucidating, and pitched in a way that is accessible to undergraduate students... [S]port studies has not always benefited from the intrusion of scholars from the cultural studies and media studies mainstream. One problem has been that cultural studies scholars do not generally know as much about sport as scholars who have devoted their careers to studying that area of human acticvity. The more insulting problem is that there tends to be little awareness of the existing dedicated scholarship on sport. No such ignorance is apparent in Understanding Sports Culture. Indeed, the strength of this book is its fruitful blending of key scholarship on sport with theoretical work from cultural studies and the sociology of culture John Hughson European Journal of Cultural Studies In only 138 pages of text he manages a broad sweep across sports history and culture... Schirato brings the eye of a critical fan to his analysis of sport - he treats it seriously as a social practice and as a social institution... [He] achieves his aims by providing a useful, provocative and non-dogmatic text that should be useful to undergraduate and graduate sport studies programmes Malcolm MacLean Sport in History