ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a personal and contextual account that illustrates key disciplinary influences in developing the understanding and conceptualization of lifestyle sporting cultures. It describes how the study of youth subcultures emerging from the British Cultural Studies tradition has influenced the understanding and conceptualization of lifestyle sporting cultures, and their cultural politics. The chapter examines the historical impact of cultural studies on sport studies as institutionalized in the UK. It outlines lifestyle sports and their cultural politics, illustrating that many of the conceptual tools and methodologies are derived from British cultural studies. British cultural studies has had a deep-rooted and lasting influence on the development of sociological work in the English-speaking world, and sport is no exception. The cultural studies agenda as institutionalized at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) gave centrality to everyday dimensions of cultural life such as the media, teenage magazines, popular music and sport.