Professional sports are important economic and symbolic components of many North American cities and their significance becomes visible in myriad ways: debates over stadium building and finance, resources allocated to major event proposals and planning, displays of fan identity, and the various ?and contradictory- meanings that are attached to sport in urban centers. This course will examine the relationship between sport and the city by focusing on both the practicalities of locating sport in the city [asking questions like why do city leaders care about gaining or losing professional sport teams? What are the costs and benefits of stadium building?] and the social norms and cultural politics at work within and beyond stadiums [asking questions like how do identity categories like race, class, gender, and sexuality get expressed in and through sport spaces? What is the relationship between identity, sport, and the city?] Whether you love or hate professional sports, this course will prompt you to see them in a very different light!

The course will use an interdisciplinary framework and set of materials, drawing together scholarship from urban geography and urban studies; sport sociology; and feminist, critical race, and queer theories. We will focus primarily on discussion of scholarly readings, but we will also conduct analyses of popular sources (like media representations of sport) and carry out a field study of a local sport space.