homework

Department of Sociology SOC 505: Sociology of Sport

Winter 2022

Paper (30%)

Due date: April 20, 11:59PM EST. Late submissions will be penalized 2% for each day (including Saturdays and Sundays) that they are overdue. Assignments that are submitted more than seven days after the deadline (i.e., after April 27, 11:59PM EST) will not be accepted, and will receive a 0%.

Length requirements: 1500-2000 words. For every 100 words under or over the word count, papers will be penalized 1%, e.g., a 1100-word paper will incur a 1% penalty, while a 1975- word paper will be levied a 2% penalty.

Submission requirements: Students should upload their assignment to D2L Brightspace as a Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or PDF (.pdf) document.

Responses submitted by email to the instructor will not be accepted and will be considered late if they have not been uploaded to the submission box on D2L Brightspace.

Formatting requirements: Double-spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman/Arial/Cambria. Citations should be formatted in APA citation style (either 6th or 7th edition), with a bibliography or works cited section at the end of their submission. Students unfamiliar with APA citations are encouraged to review the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s manual or avail themselves of an online citation generating service.

Submissions should include a cover page that includes student name, number, and course information, along with an appropriate title (e.g.,“Netflix and Chill, Eh?: Video Streaming Platforms and the Future of Canadian Content Regulations”).

Students may use first-person pronouns (e.g., “I,” “my,” etc.) in the course of writing their assignment.

Turnitin: Students’ submissions will be checked for originality after they have uploaded their assignment, using Turnitin (see the syllabus). By submitting their assignment to the dropbox on D2L Brightspace, students will have automatically uploaded their assignments to Turnitin; they do not have to access the Turnitin site directly, as the anti-plagiarism functionality is built into the dropbox on D2L Brightspace. For their assignment to be accepted for grading, students must produce a similarity index score lower than 20%. Papers submitted with a score of 20% or higher will not be graded until they are resubmitted with a satisfactory score.

Academic requirements: Students must cite or refer to at least five (5) academic sources, of which no more than two (2) can be from the course assigned readings. (Course assigned readings do not have to be used; all five academic sources can be from outside of the course.) An academic source can include an article from a peer-reviewed journal, a chapter from a text published by a university or scholarly press, etc. If students are unsure as to whether a source can be considered sufficiently academic, they should ask the instructor to confirm its

acceptability. Non-academic sources like newspaper articles or blog entries can also be used but will not count towards the minimum number of academic sources that must be included in the paper.

Instructions:

Students may choose to write on one of the following topics:

1. Choose one sport, and apply a functionalist perspective to explain how they help to build and maintain a sense of community, civic-mindedness, and solidarity in modern society.

2. Choose one sport, and apply a Weberian perspective to describe how they have been transformed, either positively or negatively, by being rationalized.

3. Choose one sport, and apply a Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective to describe how it serves as an ideology to mask inequalities and promote values that support the social order.

4. Choose one sport, and apply a cultural studies perspective to summarize how both dominant and subordinate groups (e.g., athletes, owners, fans) have struggled with one another to advance their material interests.

5. Choose one sport, team, or athlete and apply a cultural studies perspective to look at how they have been confronted with struggles around, and issues related to, race and/or ethnicity.

6. Choose one sport, team, or athlete and apply a cultural studies perspective to look at how they have been confronted with struggles around, and issues related to, gender and/or sexuality.

7. Choose one sport, team, or athlete and apply a cultural studies perspective to look at how they confirm or refute, or have been affected by, the development of globalization.

8. Students may pursue their own research agenda and pose their own questions (or modify an existing one), with the prior approval of the instructor.

Papers will be evaluated according to the following criteria (in order of importance):

• persuasiveness and rigour in arguing for a particular position or perspective in relation to the chosen theme from the course, as illustrated through references to contemporary examples, issues, and debates related to that theme;

• relevance, use, and explication of academic sources, that is, how judiciously they choose and faithfully they reconstruct the scholarly literature on the chosen theme from the course, demonstrating that they have undertaken a studied engagement of the course material and/or external scholarship through quotes, paraphrases, etc.;

• quality of writing, as reflected both in the attention to proofreading, editing, citations, etc., to limit typographical, grammatical, and other errors, and in the observance of the

assignment’s formal and technical requirements, e.g., citation style, spacing and margins, etc.