COURSE STRUCTURE
Module 3 Topic C: Discussion Questions
Following the lecture, and having read the assigned readings and watch relevant video clips, you are expected to prepare answers for TWO (those questions in green) of the following discussion questions. Your prepared answers will form the basis of your verbal contributions within discussion sections
These answers should:
1. Be a minimum of 150 words for each answer (not including the question or reference list).
2. Be typed and double-spaced.
3. Have the complete question immediately prior to the answer.
4. Cite appropriately any sources used in your answer (use appropriate Style and Format Guidelines).
5. Include a complete reference list (use appropriate Style and Format Guidelines).
6. Hand in a hard copy of answers during discussion section
The aim of these answers is to get you to engage and extend the information covered within each theme, in order to generate a better understanding of core concepts, knowledge, and issues.
These questions are intended as preparation for both the discussion section and exam related to this topic.
PLEASE NOTE: Within the multiple choice section of the module exam, you should expect to be asked questions on the information related to any of these questions.
However, the ONE thematic essay question for the module exam will be selected from those questions in green.
Following the review session for this module the selected question will be designated in red.
Theme 1: Communities and Communitas
1. What are the spatial and cultural dimensions of community, and how are they related? For what reason does Tonnies aregue that community (gemeinschaft) has diminished within contemporary life to be replaced by individualism (gesellschaft)? Is this shift apparent within contemporary sport culture, if so, how?
2. According to some commentators, the communal dimensions once readily evident within sporting participation are now more apparent within sport spectating contexts. How does Durkheim’s notion of collective representation explain this, and in what ways does sport as a source of collective representation?
3. If representative sport acts as a form of collective representation, how is this related to its function in creating communitas? Indeed, what is communitas, and what precisely does it mean that it is the collective glue which binds oftentimes disparate communities together?
Theme 2: Sport and Small Town Community
1. What are the distinguishing features of small town, face-to-face communities specifically with regard to how communitas is created through sport?
2. What are some of the ways that the experience of communal belonging through sport is realised within “organic” communities? What are the staged sport-related rituals that help constitute the sense and experience of community?
3. How does sport reproduce the power structure (and forms of inequality) within small town communities? Are such communities often romanticized as being more cohesive and unified than they actually are?
4. How can the Steubenville, OH, rape case (not so much the sexual assault itself, but the various, formal and informal, responses to it) explain the complex, and perhaps changing, relationship between sport and community within contemporary small town America?
Theme 3: Sport and Metropolitan Community
1. Describe the difference between the walking, streetcar, automotive/mass transit, and exurban cities? Did the place and function of communally representative sport within these changing urban settings? If so, how? Are some of these urban sport communities more imagined than others?
2. Teams, and sometimes individuals, are considered to be metonyms for entire metropolitan communities, that provide important focal points for civic pride, identity, and sense belonging (communitas). Can you think of any illustrative examples of this phenomenon?
3. Does a team need to be successful in order to create a sense of metropolitan communitas? Does it matter which sport a team plays when it comes to its potential for becoming a source of civic pride, identity, and belonging? Does it matter who plays for the team (i.e. sex, ethnicity, nationality) in determining the representative nature of a sport team?
Theme 4: Manufacturing Sport Community
1. What are some of the political and economic relations responsible for the manufacturing of sporting communitas? How does this process work, and in what ways are the economic and political dimensions related?
2. Describe the processes whereby the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Ravens became established as sources of communitas for the metropolitan population of Baltimore. Can you discern evidence of either commercial or politically-inspired manufacture communitas in this process?
3. Do representative sport entities assist in transcending, or overcoming, the segmented and stratified nature of metropolitan populations, by uniting the community as a coherent whole? If so, is metropolitan sporting communitas a positive contribution made by sport to contemporary society more widely?
Theme 5: Sport and Diasporic Community
1. Why have we seen, over the past 50 years or so, the emergence of diasporic sport communities? What broader social, political, economic, and technological forces are responsible for the emergence of these resettled sport groupings?
2. Why is Pittsburgh such an illustrative example of many of the trends we have discussed over the past two weeks, specifically with regard to the role of sport in within industrialized, deindustrialized, and resettled communities?
3. What role does communal nostalgia and rememberance play in the establishing of Pittsburgh’s diasporic sport community? What is being remembered/is the source of this nostalgia? Is this an example of historical romanticizing within community imagining?
