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The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports

By Belinda Wheaton

Series Editor: Jennifer Hargreaves, Ian McDonald

To Be Published November 30th 2012 by Routledge – 192 pages

Series: Routledge Critical Studies in Sport

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    Description

    This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports – parkour, surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and others – and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the meaning and experience of ‘sport’, physical culture and identity in the twenty-first century.

    The book offers a critique of the main theoretical frameworks with which lifestyle sports are usually understood, including the concepts of ‘subculture’, ‘neo-tribe’, ‘symbolic community’ and ‘serious leisure’. Drawing on a series of in-depth, empirical case-studies, it explores a range of key contemporary themes in lifestyle sport, such as:

    • sport scapes, media discourse and lived reality
    • age, risk and responsibility
    • nature and environmentalism
    • governance and regulation
    • identity and the politics of difference
    • commercialization and globalization.

    Casting new light on the significance of sport and sporting subcultures within contemporary society, this book is essential reading for any student or researcher working in the sociology of sport or cultural studies.

    Contents

    1. Introduction 2. Conceptualising lifestyle sport: From subculture to neo-tribes 3. Researching lifestyle sports: ethnography, insider accounts and the politics of representation Section Two: Mapping the lifestyle sport subcultures 4. Contested identities, discourses of authenticity, and the media 5. Sold out? Commercialisation and globalisation re-examined 6. Escaping urban life: lifestyle sport, ‘nature’ and environmentalism 7. Governance and regulation 8. Parkour, urban space and transgression Section Three: Lifestyle sport, identity and (politics of) difference 10. Theorising identity and difference: discourses of gender and race 11. Silver surfers: surfing and embodiment through the life course 12. Skateboarding and surfing in (post-Apartheid) South Africa 13. Inclusivity and the discourses of gender in Parkour 14. Surfin’ USA: White masculinity and the exclusion of the African American surfer 15. Conclusions: The political potential of lifestyle sport reconsidered

    Author Bio

    Belinda Wheaton is Senior Research Fellow in Sport and Leisure Cultures at the Chelsea School, University of Brighton, UK. She teaches the socio-cultural aspects of sport and leisure, with specialisms in sport and consumption, qualitative research methods, and gender issues. Her research on lifestyle sport cultures has been published in a number of international journals and edited collections in the UK and North America. She is also the editor of Understanding Lifestyle Sports: consumption, identity and difference (Routledge, 2004) and has been a contrbutor to specialist sports magazines for the past seven years, writing columns about windsurfing lifestyles, and for women windsurfers for a British windsurfing magazine Boards.

    Name: The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports (Paperback) – Routledge 
    Description: By Belinda WheatonSeries Editor: Jennifer Hargreaves, Ian McDonald. This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports – parkour, surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and others – and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the meaning and experience of...
    Categories: Adventure and Lifestyle Sports, Sociology of Sport, Sociology of Culture, Popular Culture, Leisure Studies, Sport and Gender, Sport and Social Theory, Sport and the Media