From the Wild West shows of the nineteenth century to the popular movie Westerns of the twentieth century, one view of an idealized and mythical West has been promulgated. Elyssa Ford suggests that we look beyond these cowboy clichés to complicate and enrich our picture of the American West. Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion takes us from the beachfront rodeo arenas in Hawai‘i to the reservation rodeos held by Native Americans to reveal how people largely missing from that stereotypical picture make rodeo—and America—their own. Because rodeo has such a hold on our historical and cultural imagination, it becomes an ideal arena for establishing historical and cultural relevance. By claiming a place in that arena, groups rarely included in our understanding of the West—African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the LGBT+ community—emphasize their involvement in the American past and proclaim their right to an American identity today. In doing so, these groups change what Americans know about their history and themselves. In her journey through these race- and group-specific rodeos, Ford finds that some see rodeo as a form of escape, a refuge from a hostile outside world. For others, rodeo has become a site of rebellion, a place to proclaim their difference and to connect to a different story of America. Still others, like Mexican Americans and the LGBT+ community, look inward, using rodeo to coalesce and celebrate their own identities. In Ford’s study of these historically marginalized groups, she also examines where women fit in race- and group-specific rodeos—and concludes that even within these groups, the traditional masculinity of the rodeo continues to be promoted. Female competitors may find refuge within alternate rodeos based on their race or sexuality, but they still face limitations due to their gender identity. Whether as refuge or rebellion, rodeos of difference emerge in this book as quintessentially American, remaking how we think about American history, culture, and identity.

This edited collection is positioned at the nexus of sports, society and creative writing. In its explorations of the intersections of sports writing, analysis of literary contributions and examinations of craft, it offers rare consideration of a rich diversity of form in narratives that occur in, and as creative practice. Included in the collection are dynamic academic investigations into football writing and poetry focused on community sporting activities in Afghanistan, to those addressing the intersections of writing and boxing in the reflexive reclamation of the post-trauma self, the absence of women in the rodeo and who and what is represented in our sports shelves. This book breaks new ground in approaches to sport’s role in creative writing and what creative writing can provide in furthering our understanding of sport in society. The works in this edited book draw on a diverse range of methods to interrogate the processes, concepts and liminal spaces through an intersectional array of voices, offering analysis and insight into the application of creative writing knowledge and practice in relation to sport and its impact on wider discipline discussion and research. It is relevant to students and scholars studying and researching creative writing, sports writing, sports studies, cultural studies and sports media studies.

Rodeo, cattle ranching, and bullfighting converge in the arenas of race, gender, and ethics in Reversible America. In Southwestern California, these sports manifest in spectacular expressions of transcultural interactions that continue to develop through border crossings. Using an interdisciplinary scope, this unique look into the subculture negotiates the paradoxes and connections between the popular American performances, Iberian bullfighting, and Native American hunting methods, along with the relationship between human and non-human beings, and systems of value across borders.

This book discusses major discourses of performing sports within human rights. Research findings data demonstrate that sports is an inequitable field today that has the potential to be a social change agent. There is more discussion about rights violations and what the fields of sports can do to be more rights-respecting, but the discussions are at a surface, rather than analytic level for most sports organizations. In sports, culture and human rights, as an emerging field, it is important to develop well crafter theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical body of knowledge. There is an academic discipline of sport that showcases its interdisciplinary nature. Linking sport to the field of human rights will require theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical evolution in this new discipline. There are both organizational, environmental and individual factors associated within the nexus of sports, athletes and human rights. This book links together sports and human rights in a systematic and analytical way. It contains chapters that discuss human rights policies in performing sports, from both organizational and interpersonal perspectives. The book focuses on the benefits of sports and the human rights and safety challenges within the operations of sports organizations and their impact on individual players.

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas. An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire. In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Emily Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

While the study of animal-human interactions within the context of tourism has been explored in a greater number and diversity of ways within the last decade, the discourse remains divided between traditional tourism academia and outside disciplines 'looking in'. Tourism academia has borrowed philosophical, ethical, gender studies, sociological, ecological conservation, and economic lenses to explore animals in tourism, however collaboration with authors external to tourism studies remains few. This edited volume strengthens the bridge between tourism academia and other disciplines by highlighting the fresh perspectives, emerging methodologies and innovative interdisciplinary conventions at the forefront of animals in tourism research, whilst critically working towards more ethical human-animal interactions within the tourism and leisure space. Split into four parts 'emerging motivations', 'emerging cultures', 'emerging narratives', and 'emerging reflections', this unique text will be widely applicable to scholars working towards equitable human-animal interactions within tourism.

In recent years, there has been increased attention towards activism in sporting spaces. A vast majority of these contributions have focused on intra-nation tensions and impact. Yet, there is a dearth of scholarship that has engaged in a theoretically grounded analysis of how Black sportspersons have exhibited resistance in and through sport across national borders across time, space, and context. In this text, Joseph N. Cooper introduces the Black Sporting Resistance Framework (BSRF) as an analytic lens to examine how resistance actions in and through sport have contributed to the advancement of local and global racial justice efforts. Key concepts such as African (Black) diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, sporting resistance typology, and sport activism typology are incorporated throughout the book. Black sporting resistance is also analyzed alongside broader social movements such as the Black Liberation Struggle, Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Black Radicalism. Insights on the ways in which sport can be used to advance social justice in the future are presented.

In the years between 1940 and 2000, the American Far West went from being a relative backwater of the United States to a considerably more developed, modern, and prosperous region—one capable of influencing not just the nation but the world. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the population of the West had multiplied more than four times since 1940, and western states had transitioned from rural to urban, becoming the most urbanized section of the country. Massive investment, both private and public, in the western economy had produced regional prosperity, and the tourism industry had undergone massive expansion, altering the ways Americans identified with the West. In The Mobilized American West, 1940–2000, John M. Findlay presents a historical overview of the American West in its decades of modern development. During the years of U.S. mobilization for World War II and the Cold War, the West remained a significant, distinct region even as its development accelerated rapidly and, in many ways, it became better integrated into the rest of the country. By examining events and trends that occurred in the West, Findlay argues that a distinctive, region-wide political culture developed in the western states from a commitment to direct democracy, the role played by the federal government in owning and managing such a large amount of land, and the way different groups of westerners identified with and defined the region. While illustrating western distinctiveness, Findlay also aims to show how, in its sustaining mobilization for war, the region became tethered to the entire nation more than ever before, but on its own terms. Findlay presents an innovative approach to viewing the American West as a region distinctive of the United States, one that occasionally stood ahead of, at odds with, and even in defiance of the nation.

In 1983—as France struggled with race-based crimes, police brutality, and public unrest—youths from Vénissieux (working-class suburbs of Lyon) led the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first national demonstration of its type in France. As Abdellali Hajjat reveals, the historic March for Equality and Against Racism symbolized for many the experience of the children of postcolonial immigrants. Inspired by the May '68 protests, these young immigrants stood against racist crimes, for equality before the law and the police, and for basic rights such as the right to work and housing. Hajjat also considers the divisions that arose from the march and offers fresh insight into the paradoxes and intricacies of movements pushing toward sweeping social change. Translated into English for the first time, The Wretched of France contemplates the protest's lasting significance in France as well as its impact within the context of larger and comparable movements for civil rights, particularly in the US.