This volume of essays examines the ways in which sports have become a means for the communication of social identity in the United States. The essays included here explore the question, How is identity engaged in the performance and spectatorship of sports? Defining sports as the whole range of mediated professional sports, and considering actual participation in sports, the chapters herein address a varied range of ways in which sports as a cultural entity becomes a site for the creation and management of symbolic components of identity. Originating in the New Agendas in Communication symposium sponsored by the University of Texas College of Communication, this volume provides contemporary explorations of sports and identity, highlighting the perspectives of up-and-coming scholars and researchers. It has much to offer readers in communication, sociology of sport, human kinetics, and related areas.

The athlete is a mystery to many and the journey athletes encounter involve a number of complex events that over time can lead to unlimited success in and outside of the sporting environment. However being an athlete also brings on complex issues and requires a unique set of personal development services specifically developed and intended for the athlete. Unlike anytime in our sports history, athletes require a specific set of personal development services to assist in their overall personal development. Males as well as female athletes, from a variety of social economic backgrounds are engaging in destructive and at times criminal behavior. Also all athletes will experience a transition from the youth level, collegiate level and if fortunate on the professional level. This book delivers a historical overview, researched based theory and more importantly methods of application specifically targeting the athlete. Athletic Identity: Invincible and Invisible, the Personal Development of the Athlete, is about the journey all athletes face due to their participation in sport. The book examines the role athletic identity plays in an athlete’s personal, social and professional development. The book also introduces unique stages all athletes enter and exit while involved in sports participation. The book is contains years research to provide the necessary curriculum and practical approach needed when providing holistic personal development services for athletes. Keywords: Athletic Identity, Personal, Development Student Athlete Development, Athlete Behavior, Transition

This book examines how different stages of adult life affect participation in lifestyle sports and in the construction of identity. Drawing on multi-disciplinary perspectives, it explores how gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and location, in conjunction with age and stage in career, affect lifestyle sport practices and meanings. Tracing engagement with lifestyle sport across the lifecourse, from young adult to older age, the book examines the concepts of authenticity and identity in subcultural and alternative sports, exploring how individuals develop lifestyle sport identities, maintain authentic identities, and how they manage those identities as older adults. It presents a range of fascinating, cutting-edge case studies from around the world, covering sports as diverse as climbing, surfing, mountain biking, skateboarding and roller derby, and considers key contemporary issues such as professionalisation, sports labor, and digital technology. It also highlights political tensions and shifts that shape the identities of lifestyle sport communities. This is essential reading for anybody with a serious interest in alternative or lifestyle sports, the relationships between sport and wider society, or the development of subcultures and cultural identity.

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.

A collection of nine essays weighing the impact sports has on a society's expression and identity. The contributing social anthropologists apply critical cultural theories to topics in ethnicity, representation in Turkish wrestling, regional identity in Northern Pakistan as evidenced by the game of polo, female bullfighting, cricket as a form of social empowerment, soccer as a play of social protest and change in colonial Zimbabwe, and Spanish nationalism on the soccer fields. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What is the relationship between sport and national identity? What can sport tell us about changing perceptions of national identity? Bringing together the work of established historians and younger commentators, this illuminating text surveys the last half-century, giving due attention to the place of sport in our social and political history. It Includes studies of: · English football and British decline · Englishness and sport · Ethnicity and nationalism in Scotland · Social change and national pride in Wales · Irish international football and Irishness · Sport and identity in South Africa · Cricket and identity crisis in the Caribbean · Baseball, exceptionalism and American Sport · Popular mythology surrounding the sporting rivalry between New Zealand and Australia Sport and National Identity in the Post-War World presents a wealth of original research into contemporary social history and provides illuminating material for historians and sociologists alike.

Including the work of top sports communication researchers, Examining Identity in Sports Media explores identity issues, including gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability, as well as the intersections within these various identity issues. This co-edited, twelve-chapter book investigates how various identity groups are framed, treated, affected, and shaped by a ubiquitous sports media, including television, magazines, film, the Internet, and newspapers. While other books may devote a chapter or section to issues of identity in sports media, this book offers a complete examination of identity from cover to cover, allowing identity variables to be both isolated and intermingled to capture how identity is negotiated within sports media platforms. Far more than a series of case studies, this book surveys the current state of the field while providing insight on future directions for identity scholarship in sports communication. Examining Identity in Sports Media is ideal for undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Sports Communication, Sports Media, Media Criticism, Sports Sociology, Gender Communication, and Identity Politics.