Coming to Terms with Cultural Studies

This article represents an abbreviated call to intellectual specificity in response to the growing, if somewhat nebulous, presence of cultural studies within the sociology of sport. Without acknowledged boundaries, cultural studies is liable to lose its political, empirical, and theoretical impetus, resulting in a slide into the morass of intellectual incomprehensibility and disregard; discussions pertaining to boundary recognition, let alone maintenance, thus being an absolute necessity. Therefore, the author hopes to encourage the development of an approach that more closely engages the primary tenets and practices of the broader cultural studies project, while furthering the understanding of contemporary sport culture. Through recourse to Stuart Hall’s Marxism without guarantees and Lawrence Grossberg’s radical contextualism, this discussion advances an approach premised on, and seeking to both excavate and theorize, the contingent relations, structure, and effects of sport forms, an approach that could be characterized as a sport without guarantees.