Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to the critical study of sports, science, and technology intersections in society. To do so we first provide provisional definitions of sport, science, and technology in relation to their associated fields—Sport Studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). We next highlight key writings within critical Sport Studies and STS that predate and help to inform this collection. Clarifying past empirical and theoretical approaches assists in charting a course for the emerging themes, issues, theoretical debates, and methodological concerns that continue to shape the interactions between Sport Studies and STS, and are highlighted by each of the Sports, Society, and Technology chapters. Foregrounding the book’s thematic organization, we conclude the chapter with a discussion of these productive collisions before introducing each of the authors' contributions. An examination of these important exchanges heightens the visibility of science, technology and sporting cultures, their contemporary and historical contexts, their entanglements, and their disciplinary futures.
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Notes
- 1.
We realize we are providing very general themes (and an incomplete account at that) as our purpose is to provide examples that reveal the diversity of topics covered to date. It would be impossible to fully document the related and substantial body of scholarship that predates and informs this anthology in the limited space of this introduction. However, there are books and anthologies which provide useful introductions, overviews, and analyses. These include but are not limited to Vertinsky’s (1994) examination of nineteenth-century medical ideologies and women’s physical activity; Young’s (2004) edited collection on risk and injury; Tolleneer et al. (2013) on doping and sports and Henne (2015) on doping and sex regulations in sport; Miah’s (2004, 2017) interrogation of both gene doping and sports-digital relationships; Magdalinski (2009) and Fouché (2017) on sporting bodies and technology; Lupton’s (2016) exploration of the quantified self and self-tracking and Millington’s (2017) examination of the datafication of contemporary fitness; and Taylor’s (2012) unpacking of esports. For an excellent introduction to the critical Sociology of Sport see Coakley (2017).
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Sterling, J.J., McDonald, M.G. (2020). Introduction: Sports, Society, and Technology. In: Sterling, J., McDonald, M. (eds) Sports, Society, and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_1
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