Sport mega-events are more than just large-scale gatherings and celebrations of human athletic achievement; they are also arenas through which groups and individuals perform, reinforce, challenge and disrupt identities, power and status. Understanding that sport is widely recognised as a practice
through which normative ideas of gender are both reinforced and challenged, this book explores how this is magnified in the context of sport mega-events with their associated global media attention, elite performance, and social and cultural relevance.
As sport mega-events become ever more prominent in popular culture, and are used by governments as tools to stimulate national and regional development, critical analysis of the gendered aspects of mega-events is increasingly important. Featuring a range of mega-event case studies and conceptual
discussions, Sport, Gender and Mega-Events shows the significance of mega-events to wider sporting practices, and considers how these highly mediatised global phenomena both reflect and help shape broader ideas about gender, sex and identity in and beyond sport.
Demonstrating how mega-events represent an important context through which to explore questions related to sex, gender and identity, Dashper’s exquisitely collated chapters unpick mega-events as gendered entities and showcase how they both position athletes in relation to one of two binary sex
positions – male or female – and also push the boundaries of what we see and accept as recognisably gendered male or female bodies and identities.
Social media and digital technologies have become significant forces in the sport industry. From athletes and fans interacting via social media and video games, sport organizations integrating these technologies into marketing and public relations functions, to coaches and athletic trainers using
digital technology to monitor athletes’ biometric information, these technologies are pervasive in sport. However, the literature at the intersection of sport and social and digital media lies almost exclusively in the domain of marketing and management. While these technologies are often
championed for the benefits they offer in these functional areas, the effects and outcomes of these technologies have impacts on athletes, fans, and other society that warrant further attention.
This volume brings together a collection of essays from leading global scholars working in diverse areas as sport sociology, sport management, sport media, and sport communication to illustrate how sociological approaches are imperative to enhancing our understanding of sport and social media and
digital technology. Within this volume, scholars address topics such as gender, sexuality, racism, identity, politics, mental health, and surveillance and outline how sociological approaches to these topics offer important analyses that further our understanding of the comprehensive effects of
social media and digital technology on sport stakeholders.
In cities around the world, in parks and roadways, people are taking part in sporting charity challenges. Corporate sponsorship has transformed these events into philanthropic endeavours that bring corporate marketing strategies together with medical research and social care agendas.
Despite this growth in popularity, little academic attention has paid attention to the ways in which gendered labour shapes the nature of sports-charity events.
Sports Charity and Gendered Labour explores a series of questions about the meaning and politics of physical activity, and notions of gender, labour and responsibility.Drawing upon auto-ethnography, studies of major events, in-depth interviews, and analysis of social media, Sports Charity and
Gendered Labour provides examples for teaching and knowledge sharing across analyses of gender, sport, leisure, health and wellbeing in ways that will have broad relevance to a range of audiences.
The Adventure Tourist: Being, Knowing, Becoming brings together two broad areas of academic inquiry – adventure tourism and hospitality studies. In situating the adventure tourist within social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts, The Adventure Tourist considers the adventure
experience and offers new ways in which this can be more deeply analysed and interpreted.
Focused on the personal tourist experience and what it means to seek adventure through tourism in an uncertain and troubled world, Farkić and Gebbels question the dynamic interactions in modern commodified adventure tourism practice. By questioning hospitality services through philosophical and
sociological concepts, focus is maintained on the agency of the individual, bringing into discussion the senses, emotions, and desires of those who consume outdoor spaces globally.
The Adventure Tourist responds to the requirements of the outdoor adventure industry today and considers how engagement with theory can inform, challenge and support real-world scenarios in this sector.
Public awareness of and sensitivity to questions of pain, risk and injury in sport is more acute than ever before. Whether it is questions of what sport (and fans) can realistically and responsibly expect of athletes, how revered practices almost inevitably culminate in suffering bodies, or the
widespread attention being paid to injury outcomes (especially concussion), it is clear that sport in many settings currently operates in a climate that is both more scientifically and medically aware and more sensitive to risk 'outcomes'.
This volume closely explores the full panorama of pain, risk and injury in the cultural, organizational and legal orbits of sport spaces. Aimed at students, researchers as well as applied professionals, the volume sets the cultural, structural and organizational context that gives rise to pain, risk
and injury in the first place, provides substantive empirical examples from diverse sports arenas, looks at the key issues and dimensions of pain, risk and injury in the social consciousness today, and explores three different 'spins' on making sense of the subject matter -- from the position of the
issue of consent and the courts, from the position of exploitation and corporate victimization, and from the understudied position of why athletes exit sport as an outcome of pain and injury and with what consequences.
This timely and needed addition to the sport literature is an exciting 'on-the-bubble' treatment of a topic that is increasingly troubling authorities and affecting how and whether sport is undertaken.