"It's Just a Sport. It's Just a Sport, Right?": The Reproduction of Class Privilege in Ultimate
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Authors
Titley, Fraser
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Ultimate , Class Privilege , Race and Sport , Gender and Sport
Alternative Title
Abstract
Invented in 1968, Ultimate is a self-officiating, non-contact, team sport played with a flying disc. Over the course of the past 50 years, Ultimate has rapidly gained popularity and is often cited as being among the fastest growing sports in the world (World Flying Disc Federation, 2015; USA Ultimate, 2015). Interestingly, because it requires no referees, is usually played mixed (co-ed), and can be inexpensive to play, proponents of the sport portray Ultimate as being a more accessible and equitable alternative to “mainstream” sports (Walters, 2008). However, despite these distinctive traits and this progressive rhetoric, as a committed member of the Ultimate community for the last decade, I’ve noticed a problem: Ultimate tends to be played only by an incredibly homogenous and privileged group of people. Further, Ultimate has only been studied by a handful of people (Hamish Crocket, Gerald Griggs, Lindsay Pattison, Andrew Thornton, and Kirsten Walters), none of whom have substantively addressed the Ultimate community’s apparent homogeneity and affluence. In this thesis, I address this issue by employing Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual schema to analyse my five-month long ethnographic research project as a member of the Ultimate community in Kingston, Ontario. Specifically, I use Bourdieu’s notion of social class and his concepts of capital, habitus, and taste to analyse the seven interviews that I conducted with mixed Ultimate players and the field notes I took during several hundred hours of participant observation. In doing so, I develop the argument that active participation in the Kingston Ultimate community functions to systematically maintain and reproduce the structural advantages of an already privileged group of people. I suggest, therefore, that Ultimate, a purportedly progressive form of recreation, is, in fact, a mechanism through which players distinguish themselves from “lower class” groups, thus (re)producing a particular social class identity that locates them at the top of the social hierarchy. I conclude this thesis by offering my recommendations for how individual Ultimate players and the entire Ultimate community might improve the accessibility and equity of our sport.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Queen's University's Thesis/Dissertation Non-Exclusive License for Deposit to QSpace and Library and Archives Canada
ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Queen's University's Thesis/Dissertation Non-Exclusive License for Deposit to QSpace and Library and Archives Canada
ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.