Sporting Realities: Critical Readings of the Sports Documentary

Despite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration.

Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary’s cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. It considers and critiques the sports documentary’s visible and powerful position in contemporary culture and forges novel connections between the study of nonfiction media and sport.


 

Samantha N. Sheppard is Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen and coeditor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry. Travis Vogan is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television and ESPN: The Making of the Sports Media Empire.