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Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart. Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.
Triathlons, such as the famously arduous Ironman Triathlon, and “extreme” mountain biking—hair-raising events held over exceedingly dangerous terrain—are prime examples of the new “lifestyle sports” that have grown in recent years from oddball pursuits, practiced by a handful of characters, into multi-million-dollar industries. In Why Would Anyone Do That? sociologist Stephen C. Poulson offers a fascinating exploration of these new and physically demanding sports, shedding light on why some people find them so compelling. Drawing on interviews with lifestyle sport competitors, on his own experience as a participant, on advertising for lifestyle sport equipment, and on editorial c...
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes, resembling urban gymnasts to passersby and awestruck spectators. In Parkour and the City, cultural sociologist Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger. Parkour’s modern development has been tied closely to the growth of the internet. The sport is inevitably a YouTube phenomenon, making it exemplary of new forms of globalized communication. Parkour’s dangerous stunts resonate, too, Kidder contends, with a neoliberal ideology that is ambivalent about risk. Moreover, as a male-dominated sport, parkour, with its glorification of strength and daring, reflects contemporary Western notions of masculinity. At the same time, Kidder writes, most athletes (known as “traceurs” or “freerunners”) reject a “daredevil” label, preferring a deliberate, reasoned hedging of bets with their own safety—rather than a “pushing the edge” ethos normally associated with extreme sports.
This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports – parkour, surfing, skateboarding, kite-surfing and others – and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the dominant meanings and experience of ‘sport’ and physical culture. Drawing on a series of in-depth, empirical case-studies, the book offers a re-evaluation of theoretical frameworks with which lifestyle sports have been understood, and focuses on aspects of their cultural politics that have received little attention, particularly the racialization of lifestyle sporting spaces. Centrally, it re-assess the political potential of lifestyle sports, considering if lifestyle sports cultures...
Since their emergence in the 1960s, lifestyle sports (also referred to as action sport, extreme sports, adventure sports) have experienced unprecedented growth both in terms of participation and in their increased visibility across public and private space. book seeks to explore the changing representation and consumption of lifestyle sport in the twenty-first century. The essays, which cover a range of sports, and geographical contexts (including Brazil, Europe, North America and Australasia) focus on three themes. First, essays scrutinise aspects of the commercialisation process and impact of the media, reviewing and reconsidering theoretical frameworks to understand these processes. The s...
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Youth Culture and Sport critically interrogates and challenges contemporary articulations of race, class, gender, and sexual relations circulating throughout popular iterations of youth sporting culture in late-capitalism. Written against the backdrop of important changes in social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics taking place in corporate culture's war on kids, this exciting new volume marks the first anthology to critically examine the intersection of youth culture and sport in an age of global uncertainty. Bringing together leading scholars from cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sport studies, and related fields, chapters range in scope from 'action' sport subcultures and community redevelopment programs to the cultural politics of white masculinity and Nike advertising. It is a must read for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the role sport plays in the construction of experiences, identities, practices, and social differences of contemporary youth culture.
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