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College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management

  • A long-range shot of a stadium field, floodlights and seating. A green field, with painted white lines, is visible in the foreground. On the foreground a group of fans is celebrating a goal. In the background are diffuse out-of-focus stadium seats. Large, bright floodlights are in the top-left and top-right corners of the image.

Sport Media and Cultural Studies Laboratory

Sport Media and Cultural Studies provides a collaborative space for faculty and students to examine communicative dynamics and patterns, cultural representations, and political economy of sport media through both research and teaching.

Mission Statement

We seek to critically interrogate the social, economic, and political structure as well as meanings of the ever-evolving sport media industry. Our goal is to advance knowledge in this area by fostering continued collaborative teaching and research efforts across the Department of Sport and Entertainment Management and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.


Faculty Lab Members


Ph.D. Student Lab Members


Current Research Projects

  • Constructing gender in sport film: An analysis of "A League of Their Own" 2022 series – Led by Ph.D. student Yutong Xu
  • The cultural politics of Lia Thomas on Twitter: A critical discourse analysis – Led by Ph.D. student Grace Davie

Research Publication Highlights


Courses Offerings Related to Sport Media and Cultural Studies

The Department of Sport and Entertainment Management and School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina offer numerous courses with subject matter focused on sport media and culture. Below is a list of current classes and their descriptions for students with an interest in concentrating their studies in this emerging area.

Exploring different jobs in sports media with a focus on careers within the fields covered by the degree programs within the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Analysis of prominent sports activism cases and exploration of issues of access, economics, race, religion, gender, culture and nationality, through the lens of media coverage.

Exploration of the intersection of American media, sports and race.

Effective social media use in the world of the sports media. Topics relating to advertising, journalism, public relations, visual communications, and mass communications will be discussed. Provides contextual background on various social media and uses exercises to develop best practices.

The media’s role in how the public views the SEC football games, schools, and athletes is a key component to the mystique of the league. This course examines the media’s role in the past, present, and future of the SEC.

How the sports media culture helps create and maintain, as well as challenge, inequalities based on gender and sexual identity. Students will learn how gender and sexuality are constructed through sports media and how they intersect with race, class, able-bodiedness and nationality.

History of sports media and an analysis of current relationships between the sports industry, athletes, media, social media and the audience.

The emerging field of sports team media. Content will expose students to many topic areas that comprise team media including sports advertising, journalism, public relations, visual communications, and content creation.

The American sport and entertainment enterprise: background, influences, and trends; collegiate and professional sport organizations; ownership and unionization; media portrayals.

Investigation of sport and entertainment as critical facets of American society.

This class invites students to consider a variety of classic and contemporary, international and domestic sports films featuring heroes and villains from baseball, basketball, boxing, football, soccer and other sports stages. Students will develop a rhetorical analysis of socially significant sport films after exposure to numerous critical perspectives.

This course examines the development and political economy of different categories of sport media — newspapers, sport radios and social media. Students apply basic terminology and fundamental theories/principles to analyze and critique media representations of sport. Students also explore the dynamics of sport social media in the digital age and how it enables a networked, user-participated attention economy with social, economic and political consequences in shaping the knowledge of sport.

When sport is discussed, how we talk about them, and the possible viewpoints are all given beforehand by deeply entrenched social institutions. The objective of this course is to identify how these institutions are constructed, and how sport is an activity that embodies social relations.

 


Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.