COMMUNICATION, SPORTS AND CULTURE

Sports is a global, highly influential industry that ranges from sporting goods to professional and amateur sports organizations and effects populations across national boundaries and cultures. This class focuses on the ways that sport is a communication phenomena which influences how we see and interact within our own cultures and other cultures. In using communication theories, the class will focus on how people enact, produce, consume and organize sport as a primarily communicative activity. This will mean focusing on the ways the mass media discusses and influences the importance of sports within cultures; the ways various myths, metaphors, and narratives influence participants, fans, and media views on the role of sport; the ways small group and organizational communication theories can highlight and analyze relational issues in sport; and how our own language choices influence and reinforce the interaction between sport and culture.