Sports and Society
Sports and Society is a class that begins with play. Long before a person cares about winning, rankings, or records, they play. Through make-believe, imitation, competition, and shared rules, from childhood dress-up to organized football, play takes many forms.
At the center of the course is the concept of universality of play: the idea that across cultures, eras, and stages of life, humans play games. Students explore different kinds of play, structured and unstructured, competitive and cooperative, physical and symbolic, and consider how the line between game, sport, and competition has always been flexible.
As the course moves from everyday play to organized sport, students begin to notice patterns. Why are certain games played in certain places? How do geography, climate, migration, and empire shape what people play? Baseball and cricket offer one familiar contrast, tied to American and British influence, while rugby’s spread through Polynesia reveals a different story of adaptation and identity. Sometimes the explanations are complex; sometimes they are straightforward. Hockey tends to thrive where there is ice. Together, these examples help students see how games travel, settle, and take on new meanings.
The Olympic Games appear throughout the course as recurring reference points rather than a single unit. Students begin by exploring the ancient Olympics, learning the origins of athletic competition as ritual, spectacle, and civic identity. Stories such as the Marathon and its connection to the Persian Wars introduce how early games blended myth, memory, and history long before modern notions of sport existed.
Students later return to the Games in the modern era, from Berlin in 1936, to Mexico City in 1968, to Cold War rivalries played out on global stages in the 1980s. These moments show how play, ritual, politics, and storytelling often overlap in ways that are impossible to fully separate.
Throughout the course, attention is paid to how culture is shown through sport and how sport reshapes culture in return. Students look closely at rules, ownership, media, and tradition, asking why people care so deeply about games and what those attachments reveal. The focus is not on performance or results, but on how games are created, defended, argued over, and passed on.
Sports and Society treats play as something serious without stripping it of joy. By studying games as human creations, adaptable, expressive, and endlessly debated, the course invites students to think more carefully about the roles games play in their own lives and in the world around them.