American Sports, Culture, and Education

3 credits · Undergraduate

American sports and athletes have come to signify a complex of variegated meanings that include desire, but also disdain. Through the work of a variety of scholars, researchers, and journalists, this course explores the nature and motives of societal structures and practices (embodied in both institutions and individuals) to illuminate the intersections and reciprocal influences of society and sports. The central framework of this course draws on the notion that the space of sports is defined by highly structured societal practices and consumptions. By critically analyzing a variety of these practices, this course attempts to ground a partial reading of other societal forces in American culture. In particular, the course examines the nuanced intersections of sport, race, ethnicity, social class and gender, highlighting the ways in which American sports provide a potential vehicle for social mobility and integration while simultaneously reproducing existing cultural stereotypes and structures of inequality.