Coursera "Sports and Society" Online Course

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Interesting course offering from Coursera:


Duke University
Sports and Society

https://www.coursera.org/course/sports

About the Course

Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or "football," as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. The course features special guest lectures about skateboarding, sports video games, and the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira.  We will also have Google Hangouts with several prominent figures from the sports and sports studies world (the guests last time the course was offered included former major league baseball player and ESPN commentator Doug Glanville; the German soccer star and gay rights spokesperson Thomas Hitzlsperger; and leading sports journalist Selena Roberts). You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.

Week Four: gender and sexuality; how sports have been linked to idea of male prowess, and, more recently, the rise of women's sports; the question of homophobia and its continuing presence in the sports world.  Case study focus on women's figure-skating and the American NFL.