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Out-of-school youth sport in the United States is bigger, more varied, and more impactful than ever before. In dialogue with existing scholarship, this paper uses multisite, collaborative fieldwork to identify core elements of program variation and develop a composite typology of this organizational field. The typology is based on a distinction between "sport-focused" programs and programs oriented toward nonsport social and developmental goals. Our primary insight is that programs within these domains exhibit two different organizational logics, one hierarchical, the other categorical. We also argue that variabilities of funding, social context, and reliance on public facilities are additional factors that impact the operation and effectiveness of these program types including their ability to address the racialized challenges of access, equity, and inclusion. Theorizing these differential configurations and their underlying characteristics can help parents, policymakers, practitioners (including coaches), and sports researchers engage youth sports more effectively under increasingly competitive neoliberal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws a decade of experience editing and publishing TheSocietyPages.org, and four more years editing Contexts magazine. Both projects work to bring sociological research and insight to broader public audiences, visibility, and impact. Here we build upon Herbert Gans' original call for public sociology and his emphasis on the translation and dissemination of sociological research, insight, and context on social issues and problems for broad public audiences. We begin by detailing the general challenges of such communication‐oriented public outreach and engagement. We then use our work with The Society Pages, one of the largest sociological hubs on the internet, as a case study for doing this work and addressing these challenges. Key points of emphasis include: (1) the core challenges and key principles of writing for general, nonacademic audiences; (2) organizational and infrastructure‐related needs and some pragmatic recommendations for institutionalizing publicly engaged sociology; and (3) the critical role of graduate students in these endeavors. We conclude that sociologists ourselves are best positioned to share our work with public audiences and we identify some benefits for the discipline in doing such engaged scholarship over a sustained period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activism and political mobilization in and around the athletic world in the last decade have given rise to a renewed interest in the relationships among sport, politics, and social change. Much of the analysis so far has been driven by public reception of left-leaning activism; curiously missing from these discussions, however, has been the impact of more conservative and populist engagements. This article takes up that topic by examining the ways in which Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement dealt with sport and race-based athlete activism during his presidential campaign and term in office. Starting with their attacks on Black athlete activists, I will set ethnonationalist uses of sport in historical and theoretical context and explicate the ways in which these engagements challenge long-held cultural norms and established social conventions about the role of sport in social and political life. Ultimately, I argue that a critical, historically informed analysis of recent ethnonational populist engagements can enhance theories of both populism and the cultural status and political functioning of sport itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport scholars and public commentators have long held both positive and critical opinions about the influence of athletic involvement on participants and their perceptions of the social world. Yet for all of the strong claims and deeply held assumptions, relatively little empirical data or social scientific analysis have been available. This study begins to address this deficiency using new data from a nationally representative survey of American high school students. We compare sports participants and their peers in terms of concern for social problems, interracial contact and attitudes, views of gender roles and sex-based discrimination and political orientation. We find participants and non-participants differ very little in their social concern and views of gender roles and sex-based discrimination, while significant differences were found in levels of interracial contact, views on race relations and political orientation. In view of these findings, we make some general conclusions about the social influence of sport in the lives of American youth and how this topic may be further explored in subsequent work. (Contains 12 notes, 1 figure and 5 tables.)

Sport and recreation-based approaches to the social problems of "at-risk" urban youth have become very popular in recent years. Yet the lack of a proper theoretical understanding of these initiatives threatens to minimize their effectiveness and could generate a backlash against them. To begin to fill this void, this paper presents a case study--based upon several years of intensive fieldwork--of a Chicago teacher, coach, and grassroots activist and the community-based sports-oriented organization he heads. An examination of this sustained, grassroots attempt to use sport to keep urban youth in and interested in school and education is used to sketch the outlines of a deeper, more multifaceted theory of the possibilities and challenges of using sport as a mode of social outreach and intervention. (Contains 8 notes.)