This important new study examines the changing place and meaning of lifestyle sports - parkour, surfing, skateboarding, kite-surfing and others - and asks whether they continue to pose a challenge to the dominant meanings and experience of 'sport' and physical culture.

Drawing on a series of in-depth, empirical case-studies, the book offers a re-evaluation of theoretical frameworks with which lifestyle sports have been understood, and focuses on aspects of their cultural politics that have received little attention, particularly the racialization of lifestyle sporting spaces....

Since their emergence in the 1960s, lifestyle sports (also referred to as action sport, extreme sports, adventure sports) have experienced unprecedented growth both in terms of participation and in their increased visibility across public and private space. book seeks to explore the changing representation and consumption of lifestyle sport in the twenty-first century. The essays, which cover a range of sports, and geographical contexts (including Brazil, Europe, North America and Australasia) focus on three themes. First, essays scrutinise aspects of the commercialisation process and impact...

Within leisure studies there is a growing awareness and intensifying conscience about the potential environmental threat posed by the continued and unmanaged economic growth and development of sport, tourism and leisure. This collection brings together explicit discussions from a range of fields including environmental geography, consumer research, sociology and politics of the increasing relevance and complexities of environmental politics in leisure studies. It provides a snapshot into the wide-ranging debates on the politics of the environment and leisure/sport/tourism and serves as a...