From the University of Nebraska Press website:
Despite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration.
Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary’s cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. It considers and critiques the sports documentary’s visible and powerful position in contemporary culture and forges novel connections between the study of nonfiction media and sport.
About Travis Vogan
Associate Professor Travis Vogan has a joint faculty appointment in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of these books:
- The Boxing Film: A Cultural and Transmedia History (Rutgers University Press)
- Sporting Realities: Critical Readings of the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press). Co-edited with Samantha N. Sheppard
- ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (University of California Press)
- ESPN: The Making of the Sports Media Empire (University of Illinois Press)
- Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (University of Illinois Press)
He has published articles in American Art, Film History, Convergence, Television & New Media, Popular Communication, Communication & Sport, Journal of Sport History, The Moving Image, and various other journals and anthologies. In addition, he has served as a contributor to and source for media outlets that include the New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, The Guardian, Washington Post, Wired, HuffPost, The Athletic, and Deadspin. He is associate editor of the Journal of Sport History and co-editor of the University of Illinois Press book series Studies in Sports Media.