This book examines how different stages of adult life affect participation in lifestyle sports and in the construction of identity. Drawing on multi-disciplinary perspectives, it explores how gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and location, in conjunction with age and stage in career, affect lifestyle sport practices and meanings. Tracing engagement with lifestyle sport across the lifecourse, from young adult to older age, the book examines the concepts of authenticity and identity in subcultural and alternative sports, exploring how individuals develop lifestyle sport identities, maintain authentic identities, and how they manage those identities as older adults. It presents a range of fascinating, cutting-edge case studies from around the world, covering sports as diverse as climbing, surfing, mountain biking, skateboarding and roller derby, and considers key contemporary issues such as professionalisation, sports labor, and digital technology. It also highlights political tensions and shifts that shape the identities of lifestyle sport communities. This is essential reading for anybody with a serious interest in alternative or lifestyle sports, the relationships between sport and wider society, or the development of subcultures and cultural identity.

The book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the vibrant and growing global interface which includes Australia, New Zealand, and some of the Asian geographical regions, as well as - more broadly - the global South. It explores ethnographic writing as culture(s) (re)produced, positionalities of authors, tensions between authors and others, multi-faceted groups, and as co-productions of these works. The contributors describe and discuss a variety of topical areas of interest, from Facebook to memory work, from children's sexuality to urban racism, from meanings of Indigenous knowledge to how communities can come together to retain what is valuable to themselves. The authors also manage to locate themselves and others (positionings) in the research hierarchies (tensions). This is a valuable guide to the effects of 21st-century ethnography on the qualitative research project.

Both an introduction to sensory ethnography and a bold display of the sophisticated use of the sensory for contemporary ethnography, Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses reflects both indigenous and non-mainstream takes on the sensory and the sensual in ethnographic practice. The authors provide a collection of original and timely chapters from both the hegemonic northern and Global Southern hemispheres. As the chapters stem from across a variety of disciplines, the book gives us novel ways of determining and perceiving the sensory.

Young, white men have dominated action sports for many years, yet women have refused to accept positions on the margins of these unique sporting cultures. Developing in a different context to many traditional sports, girls and women have adopted highly proactive approaches and developed unique strategies to negotiate space alongside their male peers in the waves, skate parks and cityscapes, on mountains and climbing walls, along trails, as well as around rinks. This international collection features contributions from a group of leading and emerging researchers, many of whom are passionate action sport participants themselves. With authors representing a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, sociology, performance studies, media studies, sport for development, and education, this book offers the first collective focus on women in action sports cultures in the past, present and into the future. Ultimately, the book offers a vivid and powerful illustration of the new and ongoing struggles facing women in contemporary sporting cultures, as well as the various strands of activism, agency and politics being performed in the surf, on the slopes, and at the crag. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology of sport and physical culture, gender studies, youth cultures, sport history, and pedagogy and education.

Questioning what “makes” a celebrity and how celebrity is controlled, dispersed and received are aspects branching out of (Extra)Ordinary’s debate over celebrities as ordinary/extraordinary. Jade Alexander and Katarzyna Bronk, together with the authors whose chapters make up this inter-disciplinary discussion, not only utilise the existing research on celebrity and fandom, but they also go beyond the often-quoted theorists to engage in multidirectional analyses of what it means to be a celebrity, and what influence they have on the consuming public. The present book provides an avenue for exploring not just what celebrity is as a discursive construction, but also how this involves a complex interplay between celebrities, the media and the audience.

This book provides fresh insights on how social innovations are utilized as strategies to make sport more accessible and inclusive. It does so by bringing together theoretical insights and empirical studies from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the United States, Australia, Turkey and Belgium. Within the overarching topic of social innovation in sport, this book covers contemporary themes such as digitalization, urban planning, gender equality and innovation in sport policy and practice. It will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of sociology of sport, sport management, sport science and sociology.