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Making the Moral Case for Social Sciences
The social sciences have a legitimacy problem in the modern world. The natural sciences are viewed as 'proper science' by journalists and policy-makers because they discover 'truths', make money, and help governments solve problems. In turn, defenders of the social sciences borrow the language of instrumentality, profit and policy impact. Karl Spracklen, by contrast, makes the moral case for the social sciences, arguing that they are a necessary social good capable of fighting inequality and revealing the workings of hegemonic power.
Leisure, Sports & Society
The way we organise our free time can reveal a great deal about our identities and ideology. This book explores what our sports and leisure choices can tell us about the society in which we live. Comprehensive, cutting edge and packed with global examples it covers all the essentials for students of sports and leisure sociology.
Exploring Sports and Society
What is the relationship between sports and society? How can we understand sport in relation to physical activities, leisure and physical culture? In this far-reaching and inter-disciplinary textbook, Karl Spracklen brings together ideas and research from sports studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, philosophy and psychology, in order to explore the meaning and purpose of sports in society. Unique in its critical outlook, the text explicitly aims to challenge readers to question their assumptions about sports and physical culture, through chapters that focus in on the issues and controversies in sports and identify the tensions in the role of sport and physical culture in our everyday lives. Combining exposition of key concepts with critical analysis of relevant and up-to-date research examples, this informative and provocative textbook makes a distinct companion for students and lecturers across all sports-related courses, from sports science and physical education to sports studies and leisure studies.
Whiteness and Leisure
This book develops a new theory of instrumental whiteness and leisure. Empirical research is drawn upon to highlight whiteness across a comprehensive and internationally-grounded range of leisure practices. The book explores sports participation, sports media and sports fandom, informal leisure, outdoor leisure, music, popular culture and tourism.
Metal Music and the Re-imagining of Masculinity, Place, Race and Nation
Metal is a form of popular music. Popular music is a form of leisure. In the modern age, popular music has become part of popular culture, a heavily contested collection of practices and industries that construct place, belonging and power.
Constructing Leisure
This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what counts as leisure (in the present and in the past). Writing a history of leisure, then, entails writing a philosophy of leisure: and any history needs to be a philosophical history as well. That is the purpose of this book. It provides an account of leisure through historical time, how leisure was constructed and understood by historical actors, how communicative reason and free will interacted with instrumentality at different times, how histori...
Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience
It is common to hear heavy metal music fans and musicians talk about the “metal community”. This concept, which is widely used when referencing this musical genre, encompasses multiple complex aspects that are seldom addressed in traditional academic endeavors including shared aesthetics, musical practices, geographies, and narratives. The idea of a “metal community” recognizes that fans and musicians frequently identify as part of a collective group, larger than any particular individual. Still, when examined in detail, the idea raises more questions than answers. What criteria are used to define groups of people as part of the community? How are metal communities formed and maintai...
Sounds and the City
This book draws from a rich history of scholarship about the relations between music and cities, and the global flows between music and urban experience. The contributions in this collection comment on the global city as a nexus of moving people, changing places, and shifting social relations, asking what popular music can tell us about cities, and vice versa. Since the publication of the first Sounds and the City volume, various movements, changes and shifts have amplified debates about globalization. From the waves of people migrating to Europe from the Syrian civil war and other conflict zones, to the 2016 “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union and American presidential election of Donald Trump. These, and other events, appear to have exposed an anti-globalist retreat toward isolationism and a backlash against multiculturalism that has been termed “post-globalization.” Amidst this, what of popular music? Does music offer renewed spaces and avenues for public protest, for collective action and resistance? What can the diverse histories, hybridities, and legacies of popular music tell us about the ever-changing relations of people and cities?
The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure
This book uses the work of Jurgen Habermas to interrogate leisure as a meaningful, theoretical concept. Drawing on examples from sport, culture and tourism, and going beyond concerns about the grand project of leisure, Spracklen argues that leisure is central to understanding wider debates about identity, postmodernity and globalization.
Critical Event Studies
Within events management, events are commonly categorised within two axes, size and content. Along the size axis events range between the small scale and local, through major events, which garner greater media interest, to internationally significant hallmark and mega events such as the Edinburgh Festival and the Tour de France. Content is frequently divided into three forms – culture, sport or business. However, such frameworks overlook and depoliticise a significant variety of events, those more accurately construed as protest. This book brings together new research and theories from around the world and across sociology, leisure studies, politics and cultural studies to develop a new cr...
