Sports in American Society

This course seeks to understand, analyze, and criticize sport—seen here as one of the primary institutions in the lives of Americans. Working from the basis of sporting events in the Durkheimian sense of symbolic community, we will elevate them to the status of educational and religious institutions in our everyday lives (as we interrogate them and see them in relation to these, and other, institutions as well). Using the primary lenses of gender and race this class examines sports at five different levels—professional, Olympic, NCAA, scholastic, and youth—to understand how athletics have impacted, and will continue to impact, American society.