Books in the Global Culture and Sport Series series

The themes of nationhood, geography, citizenship, acculturation, identity, globalization, narrative and mythology reverberate throughout this book, especially with regard to how they shape place, identity, and culture.

This edited volume addresses key debates around African football, identity construction, fan cultures, and both African and global media narratives. Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens, it explores how football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents.

This book examines how women athletes were represented in international media coverage during the 2004 Olympic Games. Through feminist theorizing and qualitative textual analysis, the contributors discuss sexualization, nationalism, success, failure and the [in]visibility of women athletes in newspaper reporting in Asia, Europe and the USA.

With an international line-up of contributors, this book examines challenges to racism in and through sport. It addresses the different agents of change in the context of wider socio-political shifts and explores issues of policy formation, practices in sport and anti-racism in sport, and the challenge to sport today.

This volume explores sporting mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them.

This book evaluates the moral project of Olympism, analzying the changing value positions adopted in relation to the ideology of Olympism across the period from the 1890s to the present day. The book also analyzes discourses of Olympism concerned with youth, governance, sport for development and international relations.

By participating in the everyday life of fitness professionals, gym-goers and bodybuilders, The Global Gym explores fitness centres as sites of learning. The authors consider how physical, psychological and cultural knowledge about health and the body is incorporated into people's identity in a local and global gym and fitness context.

This volume explores sporting mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them.

Investigating the capacity of sport to act both as a conduit for traditional development assistance activities and as an agent for change in its own right, this book argues that sport can contribute to the development process, particularly where traditional development approaches have difficulty in engaging with communities.

This book explores the relationship between diplomatic discourse and the Olympic Movement, charting its continuity and change from an historical perspective.