Professor Ben Carrington is a writer and academic, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the sociology of race, culture and politics.
Professor Ben Carrington has published widely on race, culture and politics, including the critically-acclaimed Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage, 2010). In addition to his scholarly publications, Professor Carrington has written op-eds for publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post and he has contributed to many sports documentaries. In 2024, Ben Carrington won the American Sociological Association’s “Stuart Hall Award for Advancing the Study of Racial or Ethnic Inequality”. He is currently working on two book-length projects: one, partly inspired by the work of C.L.R. James, is on black cultural politics, cricket and the Caribbean diaspora and the second book is a sociological analysis on the state of contemporary American society and politics based on his two decades living and working in America.
Books
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A Companion to Sport
(2013, Blackwell)
“Combining accessible overviews of established fields of research in sport studies with lively discussions of emergent ideas, this landmark text is invaluable.”
- Professor Samantha King
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“This collection offers an important resource documenting the ways in which sport matters culturally as a site of popular pleasure and identifications fraught with ideological and political significance.”
- Professor Mary McDonald
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Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora
(2010, Sage)
“From tennis to soccer, basketball to boxing, football to golf, the visibility of black athletes within global popular culture is beyond dispute. Rejecting the view that the level playing field of sport provides compelling evidence that we have moved beyond the racial inequalities of the past, Race, Sport and Politics suggests instead that sport has long constituted an important site of struggle for racist and anti-racist projects alike, and that ideas about ‘the black athlete’ persist as central to contemporary racial politics. In this intellectual tour-de-force, Carrington navigates the troubling contradictions of race and sport, helping us see that when we forgo blind celebration of the exploits of black athletes, we might see new paths for racial progress.”
- Professor Patricia Hill Collins
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Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport
(2009, Routledge)
“An intellectual feast in every respect, this volume makes vital connections that are long overdue. A progressive riposte to business literature about sport, it is also a timely reminder that the world of recreation has heady lessons to offer for every kind of scholar.”
- Professor Andrew Ross
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“This book establishes once and for all that sport studies are a very important mode of social theory and cultural critique. It helps us view society and culture through the prism of sports and understand leisure, entertainment and exercise as deeply imbedded in capitalist economic and cultural relations”
- Professor Ben Agger
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‘Race’, Sport and British Society
(2001, Routledge)
“‘Race’, Sport and British Society is the most comprehensive account ever written about the subject - it presents a timely and vital challenge to all of us about understanding and addressing the subtitles of ‘race’ and racism in sport.”
- Professor Jennifer Hargreaves
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“So often in books on sport there is no mention of ‘race’, and in books on ‘race’ there is no reference to sport. At last, here is a superb and scholarly collection that brings the two together.”
- Professor Heidi Safia Mirza