Social Issues in Sport, Leisure, and Health

This book examines how social issues shape and influence our engagement with sport, leisure time physical activity, and health-promoting exercise. Connecting the personal with the public, it helps the reader understand how individual exercise, leisure, and sport participation are both facilitated and constrained by their social contexts.

Presenting a series of in-depth descriptions of grassroots sport, urban lifestyle sport, physical activity across the life course, sport for children with special needs, and the development of creative climates in sport, this book seeks to encourage what C. Wright Mills described as the “sociological imagination”. Every chapter begins with an individual-level account centred on everyday challenges with accessing sport, partaking in leisure activities, and meeting guidelines for daily exercise before exploring the larger, socially determined patterns in which those experiences are located, establishing a vital template for the social scientific study of sport, leisure, and health.

Touching on key contemporary themes including diversity, inclusion, health inequalities, and physical inactivity, as well as selection and intensification in sports, this book offers new case material and theoretical tools for understanding the relationships between sport, leisure, health, and the wider society. This is an indispensable companion for any course on the sociology of sport, exercise, leisure, or physical activity and health.

Sine Agergaard is Professor and Head of the Sport and Social Issues Research Group at Aalborg University, Denmark. Sine has pioneered research in sports and migration issues, and she is the current head of the International Network for Research in Sport and Migration Issues. Her previous publications include Rethinking Sports and Integration (Routledge, 2018) and Women, Soccer and Transnational Migration (Routledge, 2014).

David Karen is Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College, USA, and Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research has focused on access, opportunity, and reproduction within education and within sport. He is the co-author and co-editor of Sociological Perspectives on Sport: The Games Outside the Games (Routledge, 2015, with Robert Washington) and The Sport and Society Reader (Routledge, 2009, with Robert Washington).