Sport and Criminology: A Critical Perspective

Sport and crime are both culturally and politically significant aspects of social life, both interesting sites within which to study social practices and processes. Despite sharing some obvious touchstone issues, such as violence, security and corruption, the disciplines of sport studies and criminology have rarely engaged with each other's rich theoretical and empirical corpus. Sport and Criminology is the first book to comprehensively explore the interface between these two disciplines and opens up interesting new ways in which to understand both sport and crime. The book draws deeply on a critical criminological tradition that sees law, punishment and mechanisms of social control as part of a system of social inequality. It engages with active theoretical debates in criminology and applies these theories in the context of sport, in under-explored empirical settings. In doing so the book covers some hugely important themes in the social scientific study of sport, including corruption and white collar crime, mega-events and security, sport and social harm, sports-based interventions and youth crime, and hyper-violence and hyper-masculinity. Written by authors with backgrounds in both sport studies and criminology, this book is important reading for any advanced student or researcher looking to understand the role of sport or crime in wider society.