Andrei Steven Markovits ,,Gaming the World"

Andrei Steven Markovits
,,Gaming the World”

Donnerstag, 20. Mai 2010, 12:00 s.t.
Seminarraum 1 des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte
Universitäts-Campus, Spitalgasse 2-4/Hof 1, 1090 Wien

Andrei S. Markovits / Lars Rensmann, Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (Hardcover), Princeton University Press 2010.

Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep- seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.

Andrei Markovits takes us into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. He traces how these global–and globalizing–sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits explores the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.

Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Andrei Steven Markovits (* 6. Oktober 1948 in Timi?oara, Rumänien) ist ein amerikanischer Politikwissen schaftler und Soziologe und seit 1999 Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies an der University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA). Im März 2009 verlieh ihm die University of Michigan zusätzlich den Arthur F. Thurnau Lehrstuhl als Auszeichnung für seine Verdienste in der Lehre und der Unterstützung der Studierenden an der University of Michigan. Andrei Markovits hat im Sommersemester 2010 die ,,Sir Peter Ustinov- Gastprofessur der Stadt Wien zur Erforschung und Bekämpfung von Vorurteilen” am Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien inne.