“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

Abstract

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 Cultural Studies, resulted in the elevation of culture as central rather than epiphenomenal to our understandings of how society works. Drawing on the work and ideas of Stuart Hall, I warn against decontextualized forms of cultural analysis, that privilege discourse analysis and descriptive content analysis. Instead, an argument is made for more critical conjunctural analyses, broadly defined as the analysis of socio-economic forces that shape power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time. The article then maps six key forces reshaping the current conjuncture. Sport, I argue, is entangled in complex ways with these emerging and changing formations, and in some areas, sport is at the forefront of the cultural-ideological revolutions taking place. As a key site of meaning making, a powerful space where bonds of attachment are forged, a space of fantasy and play, and a place for identity construction and human creativity, I show how sport is now central to current struggles to remake the world system into a more humane, less toxic and more egalitarian space.