Overview

This book explores the 21st‑century practices of using sport and physical activity to engage with social issues and inequalities. Based on two years of ethnographic research exploring and contextualizing one not‑for‑profit organization, Back on My Feet, which uses running to empower those experiencing homelessness in cities across the United States, and including interviews and participant observation, this book takes a critical look at how this organization fits within wider historical dynamics of urban homelessness, race, and neoliberalism in the United States. Arguing that such programs and interventions can unintentionally reinforce the systems that create homelessness, this book closely examines aspects of the work of Back on My Feet and similar organizations, including how sport and physical activity can help participants foster identities beyond “homeless,” how such programs fit within urban change and homeless discourses, the experiences of both recovery participants and volunteers, and the tension between helping individuals and addressing systemic issues. Empirically rich and challenging some long‑eld assumptions about the social role of sport and physical activity‑ed interventions, this is fascinating reading for any advanced student, researcher, practitioner, or policymaker working in sport studies and development, cultural studies, urban studies, or political science.

Full Product Details

9781041169147

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘In the face of continued attacks on social services and public programs, Americans have once again become fascinated with the idea of using sport to address social problems. With intensive, richly contextualized fieldwork, this ethnography of a Baltimore-based and national running program aimed at homelessness and addiction reveals the possibilities and ultimate limitations of such initiatives.’ Doug Hartmann, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, USA ‘This book traces people and bodies as they stride headlong into the winds of their own abjectification and dispossession. Clift's embodied ethnography captures the cruel paradox: where running becomes both refuge and Sisyphean gambol—pushing against an urban condition that rolls back with every stride. This is cultural studies that feels the pavement, that sweats through the contradictions of urban privatization meeting structural abandonment. Brilliant, heavy-chested, necessary.’ Joshua I. Newman, Sara Lavinia de Keni Endowed Professor & Associate Dean for Research, Anne Spencer Daves College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, Florida State University, USA ‘This rigorous and entirely engaging study employs ethnographic research and sport as analytical tools to examine urban homelessness, highlighting the influence of policies on marginalized populations. By foregrounding lived experiences and sociospatial dynamics, it provides a nuanced understanding of programs targeting poverty, exclusion, and the complexities confronting unhoused communities.’ Jeffrey Rose, Associate Professor, Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, University of Utah, USA ‘This book is a must read for students and scholars who want to understand how homelessness is situated within the wider societal and historical dynamics of racialized urban poverty and the sweeping orthodoxies of neoliberalism. Crucially, through combining a sophisticated contextualisation of homelessness with deep embodied ethnographic insights and reflections, the book provides a fascinating, authoritative and compelling window into contemporary debates about homelessness, running and urban marginality. Clift challenges the reader to grapple with complex discussions about neoliberalism, urbanism, volunteerism, responsibility, racialised poverty, and the discursive constitution of homelessness (and the homeless body) within the broader systems and power structures that shape (urban) America.’ Michael Silk, Professor of Sport, Culture and Society at Bournemouth University Business School, UK ‘This book offers a critical insight into the lived experiences of homelessness with outlooks of sport and physical activity as impetus for social and cultural change. Readers can align how contemporary processes of urban change situate challenges that un- or under-housed individuals face today. What I appreciate about Dr Clift’s scholarship is how readers can embrace situational challenges associated with homelessness while navigating contemporary insight into how sport and physical activity becomes an enabling dialogue. This book positions vulnerabilities so to surface awareness through movements across space, place, and access to understand participation. Dr Clift is self-reflexive, and chapters close in on connections between sport and homelessness with urban change and the impact of neoliberalism. Dr Clift brings voice to an underprivileged population through this book by addressing the power of sport and physical activity as drivers of social inclusion in the neoliberal city.’ Nicholas Wise, Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources & Development (CRD) at Arizona State University, USA

Author Information

Bryan C. Clift is Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, USA, where he conducts research on the social and cultural aspects of sport and physical activity in relation to the sport industry, cultural economy, and inequalities.

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