Sport and Leisure Cultures

The Sport and Leisure Cultures (SLC) group comprises 16 scholars and researchers with backgrounds in sport studies, leisure studies, media studies, sociology, politics, anthropology, English/humanities, and professional practice from physical education to sport journalism.

The particular strengths of SLC are brought to bear in the group’s three research themes:

• Lifestyle Sport and Communities (LSC)
  
• Sport in International Relations (SIR)
• Mediasport Practices and Discourses (MPD)

SLC advocates a critical interventionist research mission, based on rigorous scholarship combining disciplinary perspectives in multi-disciplinary approaches, and in pioneering interdisciplinary research on important aspects of national and international sport culture and institutions.

 SLC researchers have an international profile and in cultivating a critical sociology of sport many of them have conducted comparative work on sport in different societies. Collective works of the group include Power games: A critical sociology of sport (2002), and Watching the Olympics: Politics, power and representation (2012). An issue of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues (2007) dedicated to ‘Sport Studies at the Chelsea School’ recognized SLC as a world-leading group in critical interdisciplinary sport studies.