“There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as Cultural Studies”: Rethinking Sport Studies After the Cultural Turn

Introduction

This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies. ¹ What it is and what it could be. I provide a brief overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. Such an overview is useful because we are currently in the midst of a concerted right-wing attack on all forms of critical thinking that attempt to understand historical and contemporary systems of domination. This reactionary moment is defined not just by its attempt to link critical theory to the present conjunctural malaise, about which I say more below, but more strongly by arguing that critical theory (or what is variously called “cultural Marxism” or “woke ideology”) is leading to and even causing the decline of western civilization itself. Universities are a particular focus of concern for these right-wing accounts as they are seen as the primary social institution that produces knowledge of and about society. Higher education, it is claimed, has been “taken over” by antiscience, radical deconstructionists, and leftists, who are poisoning the minds of their students in order to change western liberal democracies and its attendant capitalist system into an antiwestern communist dystopia (for examples of this argument, see Cruz, 2023; Lindsey, 2022; Pluckrose & Lindsey, 2020, Shapiro, 2010; Weiss, 2021). This is a manufactured discursive war in which “culture” in general and sports, in particular, are often invoked as sites of political contestation, or what is more popularly referred to by media commentators as “the culture wars.”

The cultural turn is defined here as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. The result of this cultural turn was to foreground: questions concerning the significance of representation; the contextual importance of meaning and its uncertainty in relation to truth claims; an increased focus on ideology and aesthetics; a greater interest in everyday life as an object of study; a broadening beyond previously class-centric frames to consider the societal impact of new social movements particularly around race, gender, and sexuality; and, a centering of semiotics in the study of culture more generally (Callinicos, 2007; Hall et al., 2013b; Lemert, 2021; Seidman, 2016; Swingewood, 2000). ² The cultural turn resulted in the elevation of culture as central rather than epiphenomenal to our understandings of how society works. Culture, in short, was said to be co-constitutive of all social relations and identities and could not be relegated to a subfield or viewed as an autonomous and discrete entity, which is how most traditional disciplines tended to approach “the culture question” (Hall, 2016). Thus a “novel sensitivity to the workings of culture” (Smith, 1999, p. 18) as Paul Gilroy once phrased it, became a hallmark of the field of Cultural Studies, resulting in an attempt to understand culture not just in the anthropological sense “as a way of life” but—once we begin to center questions of power—to instead frame culture “as a way of struggle,” itself situated within a signifying chain of competing and shifting semiotic meanings (Hall, 2016; Hall et al., 2013b). Cultural Studies, according to Jeremy Gilbert, “has always been concerned with culture not simply as an aggregation of texts to be decoded, but as indexing important shifts in the way that social, political and economic processes are actively experienced, at a subjective and microsocial scale, as well as in the wider public sphere” (2019, p. 13). The next step was to think not only about the culture of political systems but to direct attention towards the politics of culture, or what has become more commonly known as cultural politics.

Sport, as a dominant and contested arena within popular culture, has been subject to intense debates and academic scrutiny by scholars with an interest in the politics of sport from a broadly Cultural Studies perspective (Carrington, 2007; Carrington & Andrews, 2013). However, it is important not to reduce the diversity of approaches that might be included under the umbrella of Sport Studies to the more specific intellectual arena of Cultural Studies. There are many formations of Sport Studies that have distinct genealogies and legitimate claims to defining the parameters of how sport is studied. Beyond the well-established field of sport history, important contributions to contemporary Sport Studies have come from disciplines such as anthropology (Besnier et al., 2018), philosophy (Mcnamee, 2008; Morgan, 2006), geography (Bale, 2003), Communication Studies (Billings & Butterworth, 2021), Physical Cultural Studies (Silk et al., 2017), as well as from more traditional sociological perspectives (Giulianotti, 2015a; Gruneau, 2017; Jarvie & Maguire, 1994). By invoking Sport Studies, I am concerned, primarily, with those social scientific approaches to studying sports cultures, institutions, and practices, that have been influenced by Western sociology and its cognate disciplines, as well as those studying sport who locate themselves within the critical humanities, especially but not limited to the history and philosophy of sport. ³ Sport Studies is, therefore, a fuzzy signifier for a broad constellation of work whose formal institutionalization, in the western academy at least, can be traced back to the mid-1960s and the series of journals, institutions, professional associations, and latterly, degree programs that emerged in the following decades (Coakley & Dunning, 2000).

That said, given the emergence of Sport Studies alongside Cultural Studies (Hughson et al., 2005) and the undeniable impact of Cultural Studies-inspired analyses within the work done by anthropologists, Communication Studies scholars, geographers, sociologists, and others, I want to make some observations about Cultural Studies today as a way to reflect upon and rethink Sport Studies more generally.

The Strange Bypaths of Cultural Studies

In October 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part program entitled “Bingo, Barbie and Barthes: 50 Years of Cultural Studies” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The CCCS was originally founded by Richard Hoggart at Birmingham University in 1964 and is widely regarded as the formal, institutional birthplace of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies (Carrington, 2001). Presented by the sociologist and radio host Laurie Taylor, the radio program explored the ways in which Cultural Studies had reached beyond academia and into everyday life.

In the program, the Cultural Studies theorist and public intellectual Stuart Hall was asked about the place of culture within society as well as the current state of Cultural Studies as an academic field of enquiry. Hall mapped the origins of the field, and how it had emerged, as a critical rejoinder to the more economically deterministic forms of cultural analysis found within orthodox Marxism that over-emphasized economic relations of production in trying to make sense of culture. And yet, as Hall notes in the interview, he had concerns about where the cultural turn had ended up:

I thought Cultural Studies at the beginning was particularly about the relationship between culture and other social practices; culture and the economy, culture and politics. I never was interested in forming or producing A cultural theory of an autonomous kind. So I find myself now in a funny position of saying “It's time cultural studies thought about the economy again!” (BBC, 2013)

Laurie Taylor interjects and says, “In a way, you set out in the beginning to say, the importance of culture is not properly emphasized within Marx, so let's, as it were, have a look at it. What ended up [was] culture being [an] even more […] disembodied entity which floats around.” Hall replies, “Absolutely. Absolutely, and that's a trend which I am really opposed [to]. And I think it's misled Cultural Studies into all sorts of strange bypaths” (BBC, 2013). Later in the same program, Hall expands upon what he means by these “strange bypaths” when he states, rather forcefully:

If I have to read another Cultural Studies analysis of The Sopranos, I give up! I’ll throw my hat in finally! There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies. Because we were interested in the media as the transmitters of culture. But other people saw Cultural Studies as media studies. So all you have to do is find another story, or another medium, or another episode, or another serial, and you’re in Cultural Studies. So they kind of got it wrong from the very beginning. My shift in my attitude […] was when Cultural Studies started to spread, and went to the States, then to Italy and then to Germany, people wanted me to say what [it] was and what [it] wasn’t. And I thought [to myself] … the paternal role has been exhausted enough in this field, but you are not going to be its jailer! (BBC, 2013)

Hall's frustration in this interview, broadcast just months before he passed away, was with what he saw as a decontextualized, purely discursive form of cultural analysis. That is to say, the danger of reading cultural texts disconnected from not just the social conditions of their reception, but, crucially, separated from the economic conditions of their production. Such economic determinations themselves need to be located within the prevailing and changing modes of political governance and related technological advancements. He was critical, in other words, of analyses of the circuit of cultural production (du Gay et al., 2013) that too often focused on questions of representation, consumption, and identity and too infrequently mapped those moments back onto or alongside the social forces and relations of economic production (and their attendant ideologies) and of State regulation and governance. The failure to adequately contextualize the objects of cultural inquiry not only risks producing ahistorical accounts that are lacking in sociological depth, but crucially such an approach produces a form of cultural analysis stripped of any broader political significance.

Hall's lament at the end regarding relinquishing the paternal role that would dictate what the field could and should become (“you are not going to be its jailer”), is also an acknowledgment that Cultural Studies as a signifier had floated away from the original intent of the CCCS and the meanings Hall and others had tried to inscribe into it. Hall resists the temptation to act as the guardian of Cultural Studies’ borders and methods, even as he makes clear his preferred approach and a certain exasperation at what Cultural Studies had become.

Hall's comments in the BBC radio program reflect similar views made earlier to Sut Jhally in 2012 when Hall says:

You know I never wanted to be a Cultural Studies judge. It was too varied, too wide; too broad for any one person to say this is Cultural Studies and that is not. I didn’t want it. I came out of that sort of patriarchal position in relation to the field. I wanted to say, I am going to do some work of this kind in Cultural Studies, but I am not going to legislate what is and what isn't Cultural Studies. So, what I am saying now is more of an impression of where I think we are and what the state of the field is than it is a kind of serious analysis of the trends of Cultural Studies now … Nevertheless, I feel there is a kind of choice of pathways going on. I think a lot of people in Cultural Studies think we can’t just go on producing another analysis of The Sopranos. Sorry, something more is happening in the world that requires our attention. I do not know if they know quite how to do it or where to go, but I do feel that shift of mood happening in Cultural Studies now. (Media Education Foundation, 2012)

The other way to read these comments is to suggest that Cultural Studies had won the broader arguments concerning the importance of understanding everyday life and the significance of culture as constitutive of social relations, identities, and structures. Cultural Studies’ ubiquity and prominence was a sign of its success. Cultural Studies’ central proposition that popular culture mattered, that culture was a site for political contestation, that representation and the thing itself are not the same and stand in complex relation to one another, and that ideologies circulate in and through culture, often reproducing dominant ideologies, sometimes as spaces of resistance but always contradictory in their effects, are now widely understood both within and outside of academia.

To illustrate this point, we are currently in the midst of a concerted backlash against feminism in which gender itself has become a phantasm for various fears concerning the decline of Western civilization by authoritarian and neo-fascist regimes (Butler, 2024). Across the globe there are active and highly orchestrated political campaigns aimed at discrediting the ideas and conclusions of decades of feminist scholarship, much of it influenced by Cultural Studies. The hard-fought civic and social rights of women, especially around issues of reproductive rights and the bodily autonomy of girls and women, are being undermined. Attacks on “gender ideology,” and “queer theory” and attempts to close Gender Studies departments are now part of the political discourse in many countries. Highly charged, though not always deeply informed, debates around the very definitions of womanhood appear in the mass media on a regular basis and terms like “toxic masculinity,” loosely connected to academic concepts and debates, are argued over by pundits, social commentators, and politicians. Social media figures like Andrew Tate and academics such as Jordan Peterson have similarly celebrated patriarchal notions of masculinity and have attracted large audiences and even larger controversies as a result. Cultural phenomena are deeply immersed in gendered ways of knowing and understanding the world. The global success of the film Barbie (2023, Dir. Greta Gerwig) and coverage of the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup in New Zealand and Australia (which produced record in-person attendances and global media interest) enabled extensive public discussions around issues such as gender representation and sexual objectification, pay equity and exploitation, and the continuities and discontinuities of patriarchy, discussions previously the preserve of graduate seminars.

Does Sport Studies Still Matter?

It could be argued that the tensions within Cultural Studies outlined above also relate to similar debates within the domain of Sport Studies. The work of authors in the 1980s such as Jennifer Hargreaves, Garry Whannel, John Hargreaves, Peter Donnelly, and Rick Gruneau, among others, demonstrated the ideological effects of sports institutions and the centrality of power to understanding sport in the reproduction of social relations, be they articulated through issues of class or gender or nationalism. ⁴ These interventions were largely scholarly, which is to say, aimed at debates within academic fields interested in sport, leisure, and physical recreation, though such work often had direct implications for leisure and sports policy makers as well (e.g., see Henry, 2001; Houlihan, 1997). These earlier debates helped to reshape kinesiology, sports management, and physical education departments in the United Kingdom, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, towards a more critical understanding of sport (Pike et al., 2015).

In 1999, Eric Dunning published Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation, playing on the double meaning of sport matters as an object for analysis, but also a plea to demonstrate the importance of sport when discussing social issues. In the decades since this argument was made, there has been a shift in the wider common sense understanding of the relationship between sport and the social that now acknowledges that they are connected, even if the precise mechanisms of connection between the social, the political and sport remain under-theorized. The previously deeply embedded idea that sport and politics not only do not mix but should not, is no longer the commonsense position it once was. We are now witnessing a new poetics of sporting politics driven, to a large degree, by a rise in political consciousness among athletes in general, and black athletes in particular. As I have elsewhere argued, a number of factors have led to this new situation, including the shift towards more public and explicit forms of sports anti-racism driven by social movements like Black Lives Matter, alongside the pervasiveness of social media platforms, sometimes directly controlled by athletes themselves—a medium that offers immediate forms of solidarity and support (and criticism) for athletes who do speak out through an expanded black public sphere (Carrington, 2023, p. 357). This new moment has enabled discussion, dissent, and dissemination of ideas beyond the restricted spaces of the corporate-controlled legacy sports media. The conservative idea that sport and politics do not mix, and the related charge that athletes should just “shut up and play,” is increasingly undermined by an emerging consensus that athletes have the right to speak out on social issues and further that they should do so (Carrington, 2023, pp. 357–358).

Across a range of areas, and as noted earlier in relation to Cultural Studies, ideas and concepts that were largely the preserve of the critical Sport Studies scholarly community are now shaping public discourse. From explicating the objectification of female athletic bodies, to the damaging effects of elite coaching disconnected from the welfare concerns of athletes, to debates on the dangers of physical violence in sport, to questions of gender equity in athlete's pay, to the corruption and corrosive effects of sports mega events on host cities and their environmental impact, and to the continuing forms of racial discrimination in sport, and so on, we now have a more critically-informed public debate that however problematically framed, is central to the sports-media discourse in a quite remarkable way.

The direct connection between academic scholarship and these discussions cannot be proven, of course. But we should not underestimate the positive and meaningful impact that various Sport Studies Centers and Institutes and those public intellectual scholars writing Op-eds in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and online publications, has had on both public discourse and sports policy. For example, the decades-long research and public advocacy conducted into racism in cricket by scholars associated with the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Metropolitan University, alongside others, was central in pushing the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to finally address (and apologize for) the racial discrimination and the other forms of inequality that plagued cricket for decades, a problem finally conceded in the 2023 report published by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (see, e.g., Burdsey, 2010; Carrington & McDonald, 2001; Long et al., 1997; Fletcher, 2021). The work of several astute, committed, and sociologically informed journalists has also played an important role in this moment of translation. Occasionally by co-authoring pieces with scholars, sometimes through interviews with them, or simply by reading the work of academics and being informed by their ideas, journalists such as the late Mike Marqusee, Dave Zirin, Jemele Hill, Kevin Blackistone, LZ Granderson, Jonathan Liew, Jessica Luther, Kavitha Davidson, Shireen Ahmed, among many others, have significantly contributed to the elevation and deepening of the public discussions around sport.

To take one example. The phrase “sports washing” has now entered the public lexicon as a term that enables a broader discussion of the role of the State in the use of sporting spectacles to pursue their own ideological ends (see Fruh et al., 2023; Grix et al., 2023; Kearns et al., 2023; Skey, 2023). Previously only those students taking a graduate class in Sport Studies would have learned about State power and the ideological effects of the sports spectacle and known what those words meant. Now such concepts can be heard on the sports reports on local and national television and radio news channels. Undoubtedly, the nature and depth of the debates are often inadequate. As Jules Boykoff (2022) has pointed out, sports washing is not just practiced by foreign autocrats but is often pursued by western democracies as well. ⁵ But the point is that there has been a shift in the arena of popular culture that has opened up space for more critical discussions around the politics of sports than existed before.

In other areas, the impact of Sport Studies has been more limited and mixed. For one, it is not clear whether sport as an object of scholarly enquiry has obtained the legitimacy that other arenas of popular culture like film and music now have. For example, in his 1999 text Sport Matters Eric Dunning concludes by hoping that the analysis of sport's central place in the complex configurations of social relations, work pioneered by the sociologist Norbert Elias, would push the study of sport a little higher up the prestige hierarchy of sociological topics (1999, p. 248). At least as far as the discipline of sociology is concerned, sport has not moved very far up the prestige hierarchy at all. There remains a robust and lively body of sociologically-informed work on sport but very little of this takes place within sociology departments per se. Critical Sport Studies scholars who focus on sports as tenured faculty members in sociology are few and far between. For those that do exist, their work is well known, often they are well cited, and their scholarship is held in high regard, but one indication of how embedded the subject matter is within sociology can be seen in what happens when such scholars leave a department. Is there a replacement line for another sociologist of sport or was the scholar an exception? When I left the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 to take up a position at the University of Southern California (USC) my line was not replaced with another scholar studying sport, as would normally be the case with areas of study deemed significant for the discipline. Similarly, Michael Messner's significant contributions to the study of gender relations, masculinity, and youth sports, among other topics, has not resulted in a replacement line in the area of sport at USC's sociology department, as he enters into retirement.

It could be argued that Sport Studies has become a victim of its own success, in producing a robust sub-disciplinary field, but one that has failed to import its subject matter back into the center of the traditional disciplines. As Bauman notes, “[a] frequent and well-known effect of the branching-off of scholarly disciplines is that the link of the new specialism with the main area of research becomes tenuous … More often than not, the branching off means that the scholarly interest delegated to specialist institutions are thereby eliminated from the core canon of the discipline; they are, so to speak, particularized and marginalized, deprived in practice, if not necessarily in theory, of more general significance; thus mainstream scholarship is absolved from further preoccupation with them” (Bauman, 2000, pp. x–xi). It remains the case that, too often, Sport Studies is a place where theories developed in other areas are applied to sports, but Sport Studies is rarely generative of new and distinct concepts.

American institutions of higher education will prioritize the playing of Division 1 college athletics but not the critical academic study of sports institutions. They will pour tens of millions of dollars into inflated head coach salaries of men's teams, but Provosts generally refuse to adequately fund Sport Studies centers and institutes focused on understanding the impact of sport on society. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the critical, social scientific study of sport is increasingly threatened as a discrete area of study. For example, at Leeds Beckett University (LBU), where I got my PhD and where a remarkable number of sport, leisure, and physical education scholars worked from the 1990s onwards, there is no longer a standalone social scientific undergraduate degree offered in sport and leisure studies. Faculty positions in those areas have been reduced over the past few years, with the remaining social science faculty providing courses to service sports sciences, management, coaching, and physical education degree programs. The Carnegie School at LBU remains one of England's leading academic institutions for the study of sport science, management, and coaching, but it has a much-reduced critical social science component. A similar story can be seen at the University of Brighton, where I previously worked, where the number of social scientists studying sport at the “Chelsea School” has also been radically reduced, alongside a shift towards faculty servicing tourism, events, and hospitality management courses.

Of course, despite these institutional changes, privileging managerialism over critical scholarship, and an instrumental skills-based approach to education over a broader humanistic idea of learning and social development, work continues to be produced in the field of Sport Studies. However, it could be argued that a particular approach to studying sport has come to dominate. While the field may not be overly focused on yet another analysis of the Sopranos, as Stuart Hall worried, it could be argued that there is a tendency to privilege textual analysis and related questions of representation and identity that are not always embedded within a broader socio-political context. Discovering, for example, that sexist ideologies circulate within sports media representations of female athletes, or that we can identify the reproduction of controlling images of black female athletes, or descriptive content analysis of sports media texts related to national or class stereotypes, remain useful findings, but they are not sufficient if the analysis ends there. The more difficult but necessary work is to understand why and how these images are produced in the first place, to locate and examine the shifts and changes in representation over time, and to then link such texts to the broader socioeconomic conditions within which such shared meanings are produced, altered and contested. And to do this all in a nonmechanistic way, that understands the structuring effects of the economic in the first instance without reducing the complexities of cultural texts back into the economic in the last instance. Then, having done that, a question remains, namely what is the politics of all of this? What are the interventions that can be made to shift either the terms of the debate or the effectivity of political struggle in one direction rather than another? Sport Studies’ analyses of the political should therefore be analyses of the conjunctural moment.

Mapping the Emerging Conjuncture

With this in mind, I want to suggest that there are six key global socio-political and economic forces producing a new conjunctural moment that provide the broader context through which we need to understand the meanings of sport, leisure, and physical culture today. I follow Jeremy Gilbert in conceptualizing a “conjunctural analysis” as that which can be “broadly defined as the analysis of convergent and divergent tendencies shaping the totality of power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time” (2019, p. 6). This moment is not the usual play of politics between left and right, or labor and capital, or racist and anti-racist forces that we have seen been used to since the late 1970s and early 1980s. We are witnessing, or hearing to be more precise in the analogy, what Stuart Hall et al. (2013a, p. xviii) once called “the ugly sound of an old conjuncture unraveling.” This unraveling is producing contradictions in the social formation that are positing old political problems in new ways. I leave open the question as to how much weight any of these six factors will have in any given moment. This cannot be known in advance, only assessed via studies set within a specific historical and spatial location, in order to see how these determinations are playing out, which are foregrounded at any one moment and which are still present but operating in the background. Some of these factors are more clearly political determinations, others more economic, others cultural and social, and some technological, although none of them are ever only or simply just economic or just technological of course. These, then, are the determinant forces and socio-political relations through which the cultural politics of sport and physical culture are made meaningful and experienced as well as the necessary context for any effective contestation and politics of social change.

The six factors or determinations that are the drivers behind the new, still emerging conjuncture are:

One, the effective collapse of the Soviet Union as a political entity in the early 1990s resulting in the related ascension of a particular mode of western capitalism that had emerged earlier in the 1980s, and that led to self-congratulatory narratives regarding the “end of history” and the supposed global triumph of liberal democracies over socialist alternatives. The war in Ukraine and the resurgence of Russian nationalism indicate the ongoing and unresolved consequences of that moment of course. In the Americas too, although by no means the only driver of political concerns, the intra- and inter-national conflicts around U.S.-imposed capitalist models of governance and Latin American socialist alternatives remains a key dynamic in the post-Soviet era. In America and elsewhere we now have a curious moment in which the specter and fear of Communism is constantly invoked without actual communism being present.

Two, the geo-political realignment following the terrorist attacks in America on “9/11,” the U.S.-led western invasion, occupation, and subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the continuing political fallout of American foreign policy throughout the Middle East, including, but not limited to, the United States and Western European powers continuing military and political support of the State of Israel in their denial of Palestinian people's rights to nationhood. This is linked in complex ways to the broader reconfiguring of neo-colonial relations following the anticolonial struggles across the Caribbean, Asia, and the African continent during the mid-20th century and the realignment of Arab and Middle Eastern nations both with and against the West, especially given the increased global ambitions of China. In broad terms, China is replacing the type of pan-continental forms of intervention that the Soviet Union engaged in, except the motives now are primarily economic and transactional rather than ideological and political. This context has also created a space for the emergence of Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf states) as a global player in international affairs beyond the oil sectors that may well result in further realignment of East-West relations. Discursively, we are seeing a reworking of the Clash of Civilizations frames that in many respects had never disappeared.

Three, the continuing impact of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the ongoing forms of austerity as right-wing governments have sought to further hollow-out the public sector and welfare state, and the restructuring of the neo-liberal global economy along these lines. Linked to this stage of late capitalism and the weakening of trade unions, has been the continued stagnation of worker's wages, relatively high rates of inflation, and a shortage of affordable housing, framed in the United Kingdom and elsewhere as the “cost of living crisis.” This has led to important changes within sections of the political right towards forms of national economic protectionism that heralds the end of the neo-liberal order as previously understood. I think we might say that global neoliberalism is being brought to a close, not by the left, but by the right.

Four, and directly related to the previous point, the rise of nationalist and right-wing populist movements across many parts of the world, from El Salvador, Turkey, and India, to the United States, Italy, and Hungary, caused in part by the failures of the global economic system that resulted in the Great Recession, and the extraordinary increase in wealth inequalities between and within nation states. Events like Brexit, hostility towards the global neoliberal economic system, and an increased questioning of the legitimacy of international organizations is symptomatic of these populist movements. Crucially, the present forms of right-wing politics and the solutions offered are not the same as those of the 1980s, or at least we can see them as reformulated versions of the previous neoliberal discourses. The new authoritarian right partly adopts the language of the socialist left around working-class betrayal and labor exploitation by big business (even as they invoke the specter of socialism and communism as a threat to national economic wellbeing).

Significantly, as noted earlier, the new authoritarian right also rebuke neoliberalism's embrace of the free movement of capital (the language of course invokes globalists not capitalists) that stagnated worker's wages and that resulted in job losses among the industrial working class, imagined, explicitly or otherwise, as white and male of course. The new authoritarian right embraces a similar law and order rhetoric, although some parts explicitly call out the so-called “deep state” apparatus, even as they argue for more policing and tougher sentences against those deemed to be threats to civil society. These themes are then mixed with a nostalgia for past national glories, an embrace of strict heteronormative gender roles infused with tropes of family and community. The celebration of the heterosexual family unit offers stability in the midst of the crisis, an imagined return to more certain times, and of course heteronormative families areunderstood to be the way in which western civilization will literally reproduce itself. There is a fear, widespread among the European and American far right, about low birth rates among white Europeans. Family is the modality through which the crisis is lived and civilization saved. In this context, as noted earlier, feminists undermining gender roles and attacking traditional masculinity, the woke left denying the superiority of the west, environmentalists curtailing economic growth, cultural Marxists destroying the universities as citadels of the Enlightenment, Black Lives Matter protests threatening the rule of law and the like, come to be seen as enemies within.

Five, the continuing and deepening environmental crisis, driven by climate change and its devasting social impacts on working conditions, health, involuntary migration, agriculture, and so on. Related here has been the inability of supra-national bodies to implement agreements to confront climate change. This is in part due to the pushback by the political right in most countries against any attempt at meaningful change that reconfigures the smooth running of capital and profit maximization. For example, consider Donald Trump's claim that global climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese Communist Party in order to make American industry less competitive.

And six, the immediate and long-term impacts and effects of global health pandemics, both in terms of the physical and mental health costs suffered by so many, but also the instability and fragility of health care systems across the globe. Related has been the straining of the “bonds of attachment,” fractured as a result of government responses to the health crises, especially the extended lockdowns and restrictions on movement.

In a direct rejoinder to these six dynamics, it is necessary to also consider the social movements that have responded to these changes: the various green movements, the #MeToo feminist movements, the anti-war movements, and the Black Lives Matter social movements and increased trade union activity, among others, that have challenged state violence and attempted to offer alternative modes of living and social organization.

As alluded to earlier, there are counter forces to these social movements, often authoritarian in nature, deeply embedded in misogynistic language, and underpinned by white supremacist, colonial settler, and neo-fascist logics, and that are part of the ongoing backlash against social change. These countervailing forces are engaged in an ideological battle using the politics of dismissal and denial. This battle is conducted discursively by reworking previous language and terms like political correctness and the loony left from the 1980s and 1990s that sought to discredit the left. New frames have emerged that serve to reinforce dominant relations and the status quo. Examples would be terms that claim to be merely descriptive but are themselves profoundly ideological in attempting to negate the effectivity of social movements for change, and to recast the crisis as a problem created by the left, with terms such as “woke,” “cancel culture,” “cultural Marxism,” and “virtue signaling.”

Significantly, these attacks on progressive social movements and the use of such terms are no longer the preserve of the far right but are increasingly used and embraced by liberals, center-left writers, and self-declared “moderates.” Thus, figures as varied as the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson to hard right British commentators like Douglas Murray to Elon Musk, claim that the once worthy goals of anti-racism, feminism, and the gay rights movements have “gone too far,” and that today the true victims of discrimination are actually men, especially white men, straight people, and even, more broadly “western civilization.” Such figures rarely state when gender discrimination or racism or homophobia ended, or have any account of how such things emerged in the first place, only that previous forms of discrimination have receded only to be replaced by reverse racism, reverse sexism, and heterophobia.

According to this world view, the causes of the decline of the west, or men's deteriorating well-being and apparent loss of power, and of white people's declining prestige and ability to get a job fairly on merit, are due to the exaggerated claims and demands of feminists, antiracists, socialists, and the threats posed to the west by migrants, with Muslims in general and Islam in particular being seen as the main threat to the Christian west. As noted at the start of this article, special contempt is reserved for the so-called elite universities and critical scholars as the key source of the decline of western civilization. In other words, according to the Elon Musks of the world and the commentators of the center and far right, our current moment of crisis, as outlined above, is not produced by the failures of late-stage capitalism, or the contradictions of coloniality and white supremacy or even the emergent consequences of deep-seated patriarchal structures but, in a clever reversal of evidence, the crisis is a result of socialists, anti-racists, feminists or migrants fleeing persecution, who are both the symptom and the underlying problem. Hence the growing attacks on Gender Studies scholarship, the ideas of critical race theory, anticolonial scholarship, and the alleged nefarious consequences of institutional efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Sport, as a cultural form, is entangled, in complex ways, with these emerging and changing formations, and in some areas, it is at the forefront of the cultural-ideological revolutions taking place (Farred, 2022). It would be pushing the argument too far to say that sport is an autonomous catalyst for this moment and these changes. It is not. But as a key site of meaning making, a powerful space where bonds of attachment are forged, a space of fantasy and play, and a place for identity construction and human creativity, sports are increasingly central to current struggles to remake the world system into a more humane, less toxic and more egalitarian space. This can be seen in various domains, from the mobilization of nationalistic sentiments at sports events and the direct use of sport as a form of soft power by nation states and governments, to the centrality of sport in debates over the trans identities and rights, to the importance of athletes’ voices to various social movements aimed at social transformation. There are also discussions rethinking the sustainability of existing models of sport and a questioning of traditional ways of watching and consuming sports, linked to concerns over climate change and global warming (Miller, 2017; Wilson & Millington, 2013).

Sport, Leisure, and Cultural Revolution

We are experiencing what Immanuel Wallerstein would call a global revolution against and within the world system (Wallerstein & Zukin, 1989). This is a revolution that is being waged at the cultural-ideological level, as much as it is “on the streets.” It is taking place within and against the institutions of the State and civil society. As Stuart Hall once stated, “culturally we’re in a phase of permanent revolution.” This revolution is a reckoning with the unresolved contradictions of the aftermath of the Age of Empire (Hobsbawm, 1989).That is to say, the current moment is the result of previously repressed denials of the West's own racialized foundations and formation, the white mythologies that watered the soil out of which western Enlightenment and modernity sprang. We are witnessing, in real time, the socio-historical consequences of the failure of political parties to be able to solve the problems of economic inequality that late capitalism necessarily produces and the related exposure of the modern capitalist State's manifest inability to protect its citizens from environmental catastrophe (Callinicos, 2023; Piketty, 2017). This loss of faith in politics is driven, in part, by the fact that neither capitalism nor the hollowed-out state are able to provide quality social services to its citizens, such as universal healthcare, education, public transportation, and even basics like clean water and air that is not contaminated. We are experiencing, in short, the exhaustion of bourgeoise political parties of the West (and elsewhere) to deliver on liberalism's promise of equity, equality, and justice for all (Castells, 2019). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have become empty signifiers of a society promised but never delivered. The neoliberal conjuncture is dying. ⁶

Even before the current global health pandemic, the restructuring of national economies due to the pressures exerted by capitalist globalization, privatization of State services, and deregulation of capital markets had resulted in a range of discussions related to the changing nature of sport, leisure, and work. For example, there has been much debate over the past two decades about the effects of new working regimes on family life and people's health, critiques of consumer-based, market-orientated leisure lifestyles, as well concerns as to how those in the overdeveloped West can achieve a more sustainable “work/life” balance in the age of “flexible labor” (Carrington, 2008).

The moment is such that it is nearly impossible to imagine an effective and popular intersectional politics that does not include sport. Sport can operate as a political project for social change, affecting and shifting social formations in progressive directions, especially when athletes, fans, and those who write and engage with sport are able to articulate a critical consciousness that goes beyond the sports boundary. As Grant Farred (2022) argues in his book Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now, athletes like Formula One motor racing driver Lewis Hamilton, with his campaigns to address racism, fight climate change, and confront gender and sex-based discrimination, alongside the demands of NBA star LeBron James to protect black life and expand voting rights

…help us think beyond a single issue—as important as, say, racism is—in order to propose ways in which racism, the threat of environmental devastation, and growing economic inequality brought about by the ravages of late-capitalism be taken up together—that is, as equally important issues, issues bound together in a nonhierarchical relationship. Issues interlinked, issues that demand simultaneous address … To combine LeBron's struggle to keep black bodies alive with Hamilton's injunction that we think how it is we are in the world: that we undertake the work of articulating how it is we want to live. (Farred, 2022, p. xviii)

This raises the further question, what is it about sport that gives it such a prominent role in our political discussions, and what responsibility if any, do athletes, sports fans, students, and scholars of sport, have, in this moment, to act and to speak out? And related, what are some of the limitations to sport in carrying this extraordinary political weight as an agent of social change and space of re-imagination, or indeed as a space of reactionary and conservative politics?

As Douglas Hartmann, Janelle Joseph, and Jules Boykoff (see this special issue), among others, have shown, the rise to public prominence of athlete activism (from high schools and college campuses to professional sports) and the use of sport to address wider political concerns is not new. For example, sports have long been a platform and vehicle for black freedom movements since the inception of rule-governed organized play (Carrington, 2010). But we cannot just look back into the sporting past to make sense of the sporting present, rather we must produce our own readings of the current, still emerging, conjuncture in order to make better sense of the changes taking place today in order to be able to reshape the future.

Conclusion

At the end of one of the last interviews Stuart Hall ever gave, the conversation, interestingly, turned to sport. Interviewed by Sut Jhally in August 2012 just as the London 2012 Olympic Games had finished and as the Paralympics were starting, Hall was asked about the significance of the two British stars of the summer games, the runner Mo Farrah and the heptathlete Jessica Ennis Hill. Hall remarks (Media Education Foundation, 2012), “These are the two emblematic figures of the 2012 Olympics. It can’t mean nothing. What does it mean? I don’t know. But it's a different moment from the moment of the ‘70s’. Very different moment. I don’t invite anybody to resolve that into either ‘things are getting better’ or ‘things are getting worse’, but I do say ‘think about the contradictions which are at play at the moment’.” Sut Jhally responds: “Yeah, think Cultural Studies.” To which Hall simply says: “Indeed.”

Cultural Studies, at its best, matters because it sets itself the difficult but necessary task of situating and connecting the cultural object of analysis to wider social relations and social forces. But such external determinations are never, in the last instance, sufficient to explain the significance and meaning of any cultural form. Only carefully contextualized analyses, attuned to the specificity of the political times, can produce meaningful insights and therefore the possibility for interventions. For this to happen we need to analyze the complexity of the present, to think, in Hallian terms, “about the contradictions which are at play at the moment.” As Gilbert notes, the aim of any conjunctural analysis “is always to map a social territory, in order to identify possible sites of political intervention. Such interventions need not actually be made, or be made on behalf of any particular political project or tendency, for the analysis to have validity; but its potential utility to anyone wanting to intervene in a given situation is the key criteria according to which conjunctural analyses can be judged” (2019, p. 15). For Sport Studies to remain relevant, for it to continue to produce insights that go beyond the interesting but largely descriptive analyses of cultural texts, we need to deepen our conjunctural analyses and to engage in public debates around sports politics and policies. If we are able to do so, then Sport Studies will continue to play an important role in current and future struggles to remake and reimagine the world.