The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring (Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society)
"The Urban Geography of Boxingis a truly excellent piece of research. Heiskanen engages in both intensive fieldwork and sustained theoretical writing, making her one of those rare scholars who deftly weds theory, everyday life, and the intensities of fieldwork (Hancock, 2009). She also works across disciplinary boundaries. This ensures that the book will appeal to a wide range of graduate students and academics, as well as some boxing enthusiasts. Her theoretically driven ethnographic approach prioritizes the practical knowledge of participants within boxing landscapes. In doing so, this work demonstrates that theory is indispensable in capturing and explaining the multiple and shifting meanings of boxing, including those that extend far beyond the everyday sporting contexts. In the end, this book offers an important and highly original contribution to sport sociology and the scholarly boxing literature, an area considered by some to be a relatively saturated research field."-International Review for the Sociology of Sport"The Urban Geography of Boxingmakes a valuable contribution to the ever expanding literature on what is social, cultural and political about sport."- Sociology of Sport Journal