Editors: Sine Agergaard, David Karen
Publication Type: Book
Description: This book examines how social issues shape and influence our engagement with sport, leisure time physical activity, and health-promoting exercise. Connecting the personal with the public, it helps the reader understand how individual exercise, leisure, and sport participation are both facilitated and constrained by their social contexts.
Presenting a series of in-depth descriptions of grassroots sport, urban lifestyle sport, physical activity across the life course, sport for children with special needs, and the development of creative climates in sport, this book seeks to encourage what C. Wright Mills described as the 鈥渟ociological imagination鈥. Every chapter begins with an individual-level account centered on everyday challenges with accessing sport, partaking in leisure activities, and meeting guidelines for daily exercise before exploring the larger, socially determined patterns in which those experiences are located, establishing a vital template for the social scientific study of sport, leisure, and health.
Touching on key contemporary themes including diversity, inclusion, health inequalities, and physical inactivity, as well as selection and intensification in sports, this book offers new case material and theoretical tools for understanding the relationships among sport, leisure, health, and the wider society. This is an indispensable companion for any course on the sociology of sport, exercise, leisure, or physical activity and health.
This volume was edited and written by a team of scholars associated with Aalborg University in Denmark, where David Karen is an adjunct professor.