Sport Without Guarantees: Critical Pedagogy Against Empire

287 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.This project is part manifesto, part personal narrative, and part sociocultural criticism about the need to enact a performative cultural study of sport. Written in the progressive-minded tradition of Norman K. Denzin, Henry Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, and Peter McLaren, the author poignantly---at times devastatingly---captures the shifting terrain of social and political contestation and negotiation at play in the modern world. Excavating the interrelated economic, geopolitical, and cultural aspects of globalization, I argue that trans/national (cultural) sporting agents, intermediaries, and institutions actively work as pedagogical sites to hegemonically re-inscribe and re-present neo-liberal discourses on sport, culture, nation, and democracy throughout the ascendant global capitalist order. Case studies ranging from the stylish hybridity of British Asian characters in the 2002 box-office hit Bend it Like Beckham and the eminent malleability of professional tennis player Martina Hingis's mediated subjectivity across trans/national boundaries to the corporate commodification of youth culture by Disney as represented in its sport-themed films and Olympic sporting activisms are deployed as empirical vehicles for advancing such an argument. At the same time, I address theoretical interventions into sport-oriented research, discussing various theories drawn from critical pedagogy, (British) cultural studies, and sport studies that move in the direction of a performative social science. Overall, Sport Without Guarantees is underwritten by an understanding that "the cultural is always performative and pedagogical, and hence always political, and too frequently racist and sexist" (Denzin, 2003, p. 230).U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD