Snowboarding Bodies in Theory and Practice


Book Description

This book provides the first in-depth analysis of the global phenomenon of snowboarding culture. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it offers key insights into the sport, lifestyle, industry, media, gender relations, travel, and physical experience of snowboarding, in both historical and contemporary contexts.




Pierre Bourdieu and Physical Culture


Book Description

The work of French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has been influential across a set of cognate disciplines that can be classified as physical culture studies. Concepts such as field, capital, habitus and symbolic violence have been used as theoretical tools by scholars and students looking to understand the nature and purpose of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement within wider society. Pierre Bourdieu and Physical Culture is the first book to focus on the significance of Bourdieu’s work for, and in, physical culture. Bringing together the work of leading and emerging international researchers, it introduces the core concepts in Bourdieu’s thought and work, and presents a series of fascinating demonstrations of the application of his theory to physical culture studies. A concluding section discusses the inherent difficulties of choosing and using theory to understand the world around us. By providing an in-depth and multi-layered example of how theory can be used across the many and varied components of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement, this book should help all serious students and researchers in physical culture to better understand the importance of social theory in their work.




The Olympic Winter Games at 100


Book Description

2024 marks the 100-year anniversary of the winter sports week festival celebrated in Chamonix in 1924, which is now recognized as the first Olympic Winter Games. As a globally watched quadrennial mega-event, the Winter Olympics is unique from both summer sport festivals and other winter festivals, such as the Winter X Games. This book explores the impacts, issues, and legacies of the past century of the Olympic Winter Games. Grounded in sport history, the chapters in this volume draw on the disciplines of cultural history, diplomatic history, global history, environmental history, and media history to analyze the continued allure of the Winter Olympics, a century after its origin, and in light of the sustained and significant problems facing the Olympic movement. Host cities’ efforts to create positive and lasting legacies are analyzed to highlight the challenges and complexities that have plagued the Olympic movement throughout the last century. The Olympic Winter Games at 100 is essential reading for any researcher, advanced student or scholar with an interest in Olympic Studies, sports development, sport policy and history. The chapters in this book were published as two special issues in The International Journal of the History of Sport.




Qualitative Research on Sport and Physical Culture


Book Description

Addresses issues in methodology, contemporary issues in research methods and innovative trends in qualitative research that are addressed through case study examples from areas of research in sport studies. This title includes: historical methods; ethnography; auto-ethnography; embodied methods; interviewing; and, narratives.




Snowboarding


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive look at the snowboarding phenomenon, including its history; techniques and equipment; biographies of the sport's pioneers, athletes, and heroes; key sites and events; and future directions. While snowboarding didn't become a commercial success until the early 1980s, the roots of the modern snowboard go back to at least 1964, when Sherman Poppen invented the "Snurfer" by bolting two skis together and adding a rope for stability. Today snowboarding is one of the most prominent and appealing youth sports. Want proof? Professional snowboarder and two-time Olympic gold medalist Shaun White was the highest paid athlete entering the 2010 Winter Olympics with an estimated annual salary of $10 million. The book is a highly accessible and extensive overview of snowboarding, providing an introduction to the sport and lifestyle of snowboarding; a historical timeline of the rapid growth of snowboarding; techniques and equipment used; and a discussion of key places and events, such as Alaska, Winter X Games, and the Winter Olympics.




Women in Snowboarding


Book Description

This is the first book to examine the role of women in the origins, development and contemporary landscape of snowboarding. Focusing on organised and professional snowboarding, it explores the significance of women as participants, coaches, leaders, and high-profile sport stars. The book explores the history of snowboarding, the organisation of international snowboarding, issues related to facilities, competition formats which are the same for female and male riders, and injury risk, safeguarding, training and coaching. Before the concluding chapter, three elite snowboarders representing different epochs and riding styles – Åshild Lofthus, Stine Brun Kjeldaas, and Kjersti Buaas – are introduced, whose narratives shed light on the main themes of the book. With a broad scope in terms of topics and academic disciplines, from medicine and biomechanics to the social sciences and sport governance, the book is grounded in sociology and gender studies. This book is fascinating reading for scholars and students with an interest in the sociology of sport, coaching, sport management, sport history or interdisciplinary perspectives in sport science, or anybody with a passion for snowboarding.




A Companion to Sport


Book Description

A Companion to Sport brings together writing by leading sports theorists and social and cultural thinkers, to explore sport as a central element of contemporary culture. Positions sport as a crucial subject for critical analysis, as one of the most significant forms of popular culture Includes both well-known social and cultural theorists whose work lends itself to an interrogation of sport, and leading theorists of sport itself Offers a comprehensive examination of sport as a social and cultural practice and institution Explores sport in relation to modernity, postcolonial theory, gender, violence, race, disability and politics




Physical Culture, Ethnography and the Body


Book Description

The corporeal turn toward critical, empirically grounded studies of the body is transforming the way we research physical culture, most evidently in the study of sport. This book brings together original insights on contemporary physical culture from key figures working in a variety of disciplines, offering a wealth of different theoretical and philosophical ways of engaging with the body while never losing site of the material form of the research act itself. Contributors spanning the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, communications, and sport studies highlight conceptual, methodological, and empirical approaches to the body that include observant-participation, feminist ethnography, autoethnography, physical cultural studies, and phenomenology. They provide vivid case studies of embodied research on topics including basketball, boxing, cycling, dance, fashion modelling and virtual gaming. This international collection not only reflects on the most important recent developments in embodied research practices, but also looks forward to the continuing importance of the body as a focus for research and the possibilities this presents for studies of the active, moving body in physical culture and beyond. Physical Culture, Ethnography and the Body: Theory, method and praxis is fascinating reading for all those interested in physical cultural studies, the sociology of sport and leisure, physical education or the body.




Traveling Bodies


Book Description

Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice explores the central role the body has in and for traveling and thus complements and expands upon existing research in travel studies with new perspectives on and insights in the entanglement of bodies and traveling. The case studies assembled in this volume discuss a variety of traveling practices, experiences, and media with chapters featuring Asian, American, and European historical and contemporary perspectives. Truly interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume identifies and examines diverse literary, historical and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which traveling and the body intersect, including ‘classic’ travelogues, (new) media (e.g., film, digital travel apps), surf culture, and travel-inspired tattoos. The contributions offer various avenues for further research, not only for scholars working with body theory and travel (writing), but also for anyone interested in the intersections of literature, culture, media, and embodied practices of traveling.




Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body


Book Description

Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body explores the extent to which the body, when moving about active body spaces (the gymnasium, the ball field, the lab, the running track, the beach, or the stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living, as well as to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body offers a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: re-centering moving flesh as the locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.