This innovative and timely volume moves beyond existing operational and pragmatic approaches to events studies by exploring sports events as social, cultural, political and mediatised phenomena. As the study of this area is developing there is now a need for critical and theoretically informed debate regarding conceptualisation, significance and roles. This edited collection explores the core themes of consumption, media technologies, representation, identities and culture to offer new insight into how sports events contribute to generation of individual and shared meaning over personal, community and national identities as well as the associated issues of conflict, resistance and power. Chapters promote a critical (re)evaluation of emerging empirical research from a diverse range of sports events and locations from the international to local level. A multi-disciplinary approach is taken with contributions from areas including sports studies, media studies, sociology, cultural studies, communications, politics, tourism and gender studies.Written by leading academics in the area, this thorough exploration of the contested relationship between sports events, society and culture will be of interest to students, academics and researchers in Events, Sport, Tourism and Sociology.

Introduction: Sports events, society and culture Katherine Dashper, Thomas Fletcher and Nicola McCullough Section One: Inventing, packaging and consuming sport 1. Connecting events to advertising: Narrative strategies and dirty logics in Super Bowl commercials Lawrence A. Wenner 2. Football fandom in late modernity: alternative spaces and places of consumption Mark Turner 3. Debating with fists: Professional wrestling: sport, spectacle and violent drama Daniel Schulze 4. A glamorous and high-tech global spectacle of speed: Formula One motor racing as mediated, global and corporate spectacle Damion Sturm Section Two: Media and 'mediatisation' 5. Broadcasting from a neutral corner? An analysis of the mainstream media's representation of women's boxing at the London 2012 Olympic Games Rebecca Finkel 6. Sport, broadcasting and cultural citizenship in Singapore Donna Wong 7.Turkish football, match-fixing and the fan's media: a case study of Fenerbahçe fans Daghan Irak Section Three: Identities 8. The Gaelic Athletic Association and London's 'Irish' diaspora Frances Harkin 9. Kabbadi tournaments: Patriarchal spaces and women's rejection of the masculine field Harpreet Bains 10. 'Shades of Basqueness': Football, politics and ethnicity in the Basque Country Jim O'Brien 11. Local identity and local events: A case study of cheese rolling in Gloucestershire Andrew Bradley Section Four: Mega-events 12. Sports mega-events and Islam: An introduction Karl Russell, Noelle O'Connor, Katherine Dashper and Thomas Fletcher 13. Knowing the rules and understanding the score: The 2010 FIFA Football World Cup in South Africa Suzanne Dowse 14. London 2012: The rings of exclusion Iain Lindsay Conclusion: This is only the beginning ... Katherine Dashper, Thomas Fletcher and Nicola McCullough