Jeffrey Montez de Oca and Jay Coakley

Sports in Society Podcast

Sports EN ↓ 31 episodes

Where we go beyond scores, statistics, and personalities to focus on issues and controversies in sports worlds. A companion to the textbook Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies, this podcast gives a behind the scenes look at the textbook with stories from our lives as scholars and athletes as well as providing analysis of ongoing issues and controversies in contemporary sport worlds. We will also have guests who are content experts on topics covered in the book. Students, professors, and anyone else interested in the sociology of sport will find our discussions engaging. We welcome hear...

Author

Jeffrey Montez de Oca and Jay Coakley

Episodes

Ep 6 - Ch 5 - - Deviance in Sports: Is it Out of Control? 09.04.2024 1:07:35

We begin episode 6 with a sociological definition of deviance and several concrete examples. This leads into a discussion of how formal (written) norms and informal (unwritten) norms create distinction between what might encouraged in sports but deviant in other parts of society, and vice-versa. Recognizing that deviance varies across different institutional spaces based on the formal and informal...

Ep 5 - Ch 4 -- Organized Youth Sports 02.04.2024 1:10:59

The fifth episode of the season focuses on chapter 4 "Organized Youth Sports: Whose Interests Do They Serve?" To explore chapter 4, we frame this episode with a discussion of the intertwined sociological concepts "structure" and "agency". After defining these key terms, we layout a history of organized youth sport. This history shows how institutional changes in US society and youth sports have im...

Ep. 4 -- Ch 3 - Sport and Socialization 26.03.2024 1:05:08

This episode focuses on socialization in sports. Socialization is a key concept in sociology so we take some time defining it and discussing its importance to the field. We emphasize that socialization is an active, ongoing process of becoming human. This moves us to a discussion of physical literacy or the process by which people learn learn to use their bodies in complex ways. We then discuss ho...

Ep 3 -- Ch 2 - Producing Knowledge About Sports in Society 19.03.2024 59:24

This episode takes a deep dive into Chapter 2 “Producing Knowledge About Sports in Society: How is Knowledge Produced in the Sociology of Sports?” We begin by addressing a term that so many do not like, “theory”. We define theory, discuss why so many people struggle with it, how it is used in social scientific research on sport. We then move onto to the application of theory in sport research. Tha...

Ep 2 -- Ch 1 - The Sociology of Sports 12.03.2024 1:09:50

This episode covers the first chapter of Sports in Society. Jay Coakley and Jeff Montez de Oca begin by defining the surprisingly complicated concept 'sport'. We move on to discuss our critical sociological approach to studying sport, and why it is by necessity inter-disciplinary and international. This leads to 'the Great Sports Myth' and the relationship of 'myths' to ideology, which is a key co...

Ep 1 -- Our Sporting Biographies 12.03.2024 53:21

Get to know your co-hosts Jay Coakley and Jeff Montez de Oca. We might be world renowned sport sociologist now, but at one time we were kids who grew up athletes. Sports were a major part of our lives and the social worlds we inhabited. We discuss our personal biographies in sports and how our biographies are situated in social and historical contexts. Our passion for sports translates into our pa...