Ben Carrington
Biographic Data
| ID | 118056 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Carrington |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Carrington |
| SIGNATURE | BEN CARRINGTON |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1126-3346 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 272 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Representing England
This article outlines how sport has become a significant site for debates around national identity and belonging. Sport is not just a form of popular entertainment and physical achievement but also a domain for the exercise of power and therefore a site of political contestation. Due to the UK's internal political tensions and external socioeconomic conditions, English nationalism has emerged as a distinct political project, with football an impo…
There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies
This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies by providing an overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. The cultural turn is defined as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. I argue that the cultural turn, especially as developed within the academic field of Cul…
Sporting dissent
In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, sat in protest during the national anthem. He made it clear that his stance was a political statement against racialized oppression and police brutality carried out against people of color in the USA, and in doing so he became a polarizing cultural figure. This article uses content analysis to examine newspaper coverage of the emergence and…
Post/Colonial Theory and Sport
Post/colonial theory tries to unpack and rethink ‘the West’ from the inside, to subject to critical scrutiny the self-professed claims of Western superiority and universal progress in order to show the violence that lies just beneath the surface. Whilst the texts of A. Cesaire and F. Fanon are regularly cited within post/colonial theory, it is the work of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said that is seen as foundational to post/colonial th…
Assessing the sociology of sport
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on the intersection of race and sport, Ben Carrington, reflects on the field as a whole and the notion of 'diaspora' in understanding race and sport. In considering the trajectory of the sociology of sport, questions are raised about whether a coherent field has ever existed. Noting relative failures in getting 'mainstream sociology' to take sport seriously, the challenges a…
The Critical Sociology of Race and Sport
This review surveys the sociological work on race and sport over the past 50 years. It begins by outlining the importance of C.L.R. James's book Beyond a Boundary as a foundational text for the critical sociology of race and sport. Two paradigms of research on race and sport are sketched: the critical and the functionalist-evolutionary. The article then reviews the major contributions to the study of race and sport from three areas, namely mainst…
A Companion to Sport
The term “action sports” broadly refers to a wide range of mostly individualized activities such as BMX, kite-surfing, skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding that differed – at least in their early phases of development – from traditional rule-bound, competitive, regulated Western “achievement” sport cultures ( Booth and Thorpe, 2007 ; Kusz, 2007a ; Wheaton 2004, 2010 ). Various categorizations have been used to describe these activities, inclu…
Companion to Sport
The Obamas and the New Politics of Race
Introduction
Race, Sport and Politics
This title addresses sport's role in 'the making of race', the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary multicultural societies
Improbable Grounds
The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a remarkable number of internationally renowned black British intellectuals, including artists, novelists, poets, journalists, and academics. This article maps the socioeconomic and political terrain from which the "black British intellectual" has emerged. I argue that from the improbable grounds of anticolonial struggle, twentieth-century migrancy, and post/colonial claims to recognition, a ne…
Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
The cultural ubiquity, political prominence and economic significance of contemporary sport present fertile terrain for its critical socio-cultural analysis. From corporate and media dominated mega-events like the Olympic Games, to state programmes for nation-building and health promotion, to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality, age and disability, sport is so profoundly marked by relations of power that it lends itself to critique a…
Introduction
wi mawchin out di ole towards di new centri arm wid di new teknalagy wi gettin more an more producktivity some seh tings lookin‐up fi prasperity but if evrywan goin get a share dis time ole mentali
Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
What's the Footballer Doing Here?' Racialized Performativity, Reflexivity, and Identity
In this article I argue for the importance of ethnography and the efficacy of reflexive autobiography within sociological work in understanding the complexities of racial identity formation. I offer a rereading of some of my earlier research as a way to draw out some of the elisions embedded within that work. I suggest that understanding such moments of 'silence,' those passages where the ethnographic narrator disappears from view, are central an…
Rebuttal
Merely Identity
Some commentators have suggested that the embrace of “identity politics” has gone too far and that we are now in a putative postidentity moment. Within the academy this argument has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first derides identity politics as a move away from materialist concerns. The second, more conservative, position argues that identity politics is at fault for being over -political, for reading politics into every as…
Sport and Race
Sport and race have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination in sport, but these were largely descriptive. Two exceptions to this were C. L. R. James's critical reading of the role of cricket in shaping West Indian political ident…
Introduction
This special issue of Leisure Studies has been developed from a conference also entitled ‘Race/Nation/Sport’, organized by the British Sociological Association's Race Forum, which took place at the
"Race," Sport, and British Society
Race', Sport and British Society
Foreward. Paul Gilroy, Yale University, USA Section 1. Research into Current Levels and Forms of Sports Racism: Some Empirical Explorations Section II. Public Controversies Over `Race' and Sport: Science, Media and the Law Section III. Challenging Discourses/ Contesting Identities
Audio-Visual Review
Sport, Masculinity, and Black Cultural Resistance
This article develops an account of the meanings associated with sport in relation to Black masculinity, and the use of sport as a form of cultural resistance to White racism. The absences within sociology of sport theorizing in relation to race are shown before examining the historical and contemporary significance of sport within racialized societies. Drawing on participant observation and semistructured interviews, an account is given of how a…
Asians cannot wear turbans in the scrum
Since sport is accorded such a significant position within national popular culture, it assumes corresponding importance in producing, reproducing and challenging racial myths. This paper explores how dominant notions of black physicality are embedded in sports practice and how such assumptions may be challenged. To do this we shall offer a critique of existing literature and, importantly, draw on empirical evidence from a recent study of the nat…
Sport, Masculinity, and Black Cultural Resistance
This article develops an account of the meanings associated with sport in relation to Black masculinity, and the use of sport as a form of cultural resistance to White racism. The absences within sociology of sport theorizing in relation to race are shown before examining the historical and contemporary significance of sport within racialized societies. Drawing on participant observation and semistructured interviews, an account is given of how a…
What's the Footballer Doing Here?' Racialized Performativity, Reflexivity, and Identity
In this article I argue for the importance of ethnography and the efficacy of reflexive autobiography within sociological work in understanding the complexities of racial identity formation. I offer a rereading of some of my earlier research as a way to draw out some of the elisions embedded within that work. I suggest that understanding such moments of 'silence,' those passages where the ethnographic narrator disappears from view, are central an…
Introduction
Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
Merely Identity
Some commentators have suggested that the embrace of “identity politics” has gone too far and that we are now in a putative postidentity moment. Within the academy this argument has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first derides identity politics as a move away from materialist concerns. The second, more conservative, position argues that identity politics is at fault for being over -political, for reading politics into every as…
Sporting dissent
In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, sat in protest during the national anthem. He made it clear that his stance was a political statement against racialized oppression and police brutality carried out against people of color in the USA, and in doing so he became a polarizing cultural figure. This article uses content analysis to examine newspaper coverage of the emergence and…
Asians cannot wear turbans in the scrum
Since sport is accorded such a significant position within national popular culture, it assumes corresponding importance in producing, reproducing and challenging racial myths. This paper explores how dominant notions of black physicality are embedded in sports practice and how such assumptions may be challenged. To do this we shall offer a critique of existing literature and, importantly, draw on empirical evidence from a recent study of the nat…
Jordanscapes
Over the last decade, a voluminous debate has evolved around the concept of globalization, prompting Featherstone and Lash (1995) to identify this multifaceted phenomenon as replacing modernity and postmodernity as the central thematic within current cultural theorizing (for example, see Appadurai, 1990; McGrew, 1992; Robertson, 1995; Wallerstein, 1990). In light of this claim, the goal of this paper is to examine the interconnections and disjunc…
Assessing the sociology of sport
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on the intersection of race and sport, Ben Carrington, reflects on the field as a whole and the notion of 'diaspora' in understanding race and sport. In considering the trajectory of the sociology of sport, questions are raised about whether a coherent field has ever existed. Noting relative failures in getting 'mainstream sociology' to take sport seriously, the challenges a…
Introduction
This special issue of Leisure Studies has been developed from a conference also entitled ‘Race/Nation/Sport’, organized by the British Sociological Association's Race Forum, which took place at the
There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies
This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies by providing an overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. The cultural turn is defined as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. I argue that the cultural turn, especially as developed within the academic field of Cul…
The Obamas and the New Politics of Race
Introduction
wi mawchin out di ole towards di new centri arm wid di new teknalagy wi gettin more an more producktivity some seh tings lookin‐up fi prasperity but if evrywan goin get a share dis time ole mentali
Improbable Grounds
The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a remarkable number of internationally renowned black British intellectuals, including artists, novelists, poets, journalists, and academics. This article maps the socioeconomic and political terrain from which the "black British intellectual" has emerged. I argue that from the improbable grounds of anticolonial struggle, twentieth-century migrancy, and post/colonial claims to recognition, a ne…
Sport and Race
Sport and race have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination in sport, but these were largely descriptive. Two exceptions to this were C. L. R. James's critical reading of the role of cricket in shaping West Indian political ident…
Jordanscapes
Over the last decade, a voluminous debate has evolved around the concept of globalization, prompting Featherstone and Lash (1995) to identify this multifaceted phenomenon as replacing modernity and postmodernity as the central thematic within current cultural theorizing (for example, see Appadurai, 1990; McGrew, 1992; Robertson, 1995; Wallerstein, 1990). In light of this claim, the goal of this paper is to examine the interconnections and disjunc…
Asians cannot wear turbans in the scrum
Since sport is accorded such a significant position within national popular culture, it assumes corresponding importance in producing, reproducing and challenging racial myths. This paper explores how dominant notions of black physicality are embedded in sports practice and how such assumptions may be challenged. To do this we shall offer a critique of existing literature and, importantly, draw on empirical evidence from a recent study of the nat…
Audio-Visual Review
Sport, Masculinity, and Black Cultural Resistance
This article develops an account of the meanings associated with sport in relation to Black masculinity, and the use of sport as a form of cultural resistance to White racism. The absences within sociology of sport theorizing in relation to race are shown before examining the historical and contemporary significance of sport within racialized societies. Drawing on participant observation and semistructured interviews, an account is given of how a…
Race', Sport and British Society
Foreward. Paul Gilroy, Yale University, USA Section 1. Research into Current Levels and Forms of Sports Racism: Some Empirical Explorations Section II. Public Controversies Over `Race' and Sport: Science, Media and the Law Section III. Challenging Discourses/ Contesting Identities
"Race," Sport, and British Society
Introduction
This special issue of Leisure Studies has been developed from a conference also entitled ‘Race/Nation/Sport’, organized by the British Sociological Association's Race Forum, which took place at the
Rebuttal
Merely Identity
Some commentators have suggested that the embrace of “identity politics” has gone too far and that we are now in a putative postidentity moment. Within the academy this argument has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first derides identity politics as a move away from materialist concerns. The second, more conservative, position argues that identity politics is at fault for being over -political, for reading politics into every as…
Sport and Race
Sport and race have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination in sport, but these were largely descriptive. Two exceptions to this were C. L. R. James's critical reading of the role of cricket in shaping West Indian political ident…
Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
The cultural ubiquity, political prominence and economic significance of contemporary sport present fertile terrain for its critical socio-cultural analysis. From corporate and media dominated mega-events like the Olympic Games, to state programmes for nation-building and health promotion, to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality, age and disability, sport is so profoundly marked by relations of power that it lends itself to critique a…
Introduction
wi mawchin out di ole towards di new centri arm wid di new teknalagy wi gettin more an more producktivity some seh tings lookin‐up fi prasperity but if evrywan goin get a share dis time ole mentali
Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
What's the Footballer Doing Here?' Racialized Performativity, Reflexivity, and Identity
In this article I argue for the importance of ethnography and the efficacy of reflexive autobiography within sociological work in understanding the complexities of racial identity formation. I offer a rereading of some of my earlier research as a way to draw out some of the elisions embedded within that work. I suggest that understanding such moments of 'silence,' those passages where the ethnographic narrator disappears from view, are central an…
Race, Sport and Politics
This title addresses sport's role in 'the making of race', the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary multicultural societies
Improbable Grounds
The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a remarkable number of internationally renowned black British intellectuals, including artists, novelists, poets, journalists, and academics. This article maps the socioeconomic and political terrain from which the "black British intellectual" has emerged. I argue that from the improbable grounds of anticolonial struggle, twentieth-century migrancy, and post/colonial claims to recognition, a ne…
The Obamas and the New Politics of Race
Introduction
The Critical Sociology of Race and Sport
This review surveys the sociological work on race and sport over the past 50 years. It begins by outlining the importance of C.L.R. James's book Beyond a Boundary as a foundational text for the critical sociology of race and sport. Two paradigms of research on race and sport are sketched: the critical and the functionalist-evolutionary. The article then reviews the major contributions to the study of race and sport from three areas, namely mainst…
A Companion to Sport
The term “action sports” broadly refers to a wide range of mostly individualized activities such as BMX, kite-surfing, skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding that differed – at least in their early phases of development – from traditional rule-bound, competitive, regulated Western “achievement” sport cultures ( Booth and Thorpe, 2007 ; Kusz, 2007a ; Wheaton 2004, 2010 ). Various categorizations have been used to describe these activities, inclu…
Companion to Sport
Post/Colonial Theory and Sport
Post/colonial theory tries to unpack and rethink ‘the West’ from the inside, to subject to critical scrutiny the self-professed claims of Western superiority and universal progress in order to show the violence that lies just beneath the surface. Whilst the texts of A. Cesaire and F. Fanon are regularly cited within post/colonial theory, it is the work of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said that is seen as foundational to post/colonial th…
Assessing the sociology of sport
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on the intersection of race and sport, Ben Carrington, reflects on the field as a whole and the notion of 'diaspora' in understanding race and sport. In considering the trajectory of the sociology of sport, questions are raised about whether a coherent field has ever existed. Noting relative failures in getting 'mainstream sociology' to take sport seriously, the challenges a…
Sporting dissent
In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, sat in protest during the national anthem. He made it clear that his stance was a political statement against racialized oppression and police brutality carried out against people of color in the USA, and in doing so he became a polarizing cultural figure. This article uses content analysis to examine newspaper coverage of the emergence and…
There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies
This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies by providing an overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. The cultural turn is defined as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. I argue that the cultural turn, especially as developed within the academic field of Cul…
Sociology (19 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (17 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Politics (8 works)