Sports, Media and Culture

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the ways that sports media serve as a site for larger cultural struggles. Rather than see sports as mere entertainment, recreation, or escapism, this course examines sports media as an emotional guide to understanding “place” in the U.S., a field that can be constitutive of social identities based on race, class, gender, etc., an imagined realm where athletes can challenge social oppression by competing on a level playing field, a terrain that re-inscribes social power, an opportunity for athletes to protest larger structures of oppression in society and culture, and a way of marking oneself in the world. Moreover, sports media is not just a macro-political field of corporate profit; it is also a micro-political realm of everyday investments that have broader social and political relevance