“…Eventually topics ranging from neoliberalism (Hartmann, 2016;Newman & Giardina, 2011) to ability/disability (Howe, 2008) also came to the fore. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 2000s witnessed a plethora of work on the role of sport in reproducing and legitimating national unity and the established political order (Silk, 2013;Weedon, 2012), especially in the domains of patriotism and nationalism (Kusz, 2007;Newman, 2007;Silk & Falcous, 2005), patriarchy and hyper-masculinity (Leonard, 2012), and militarism (Fischer, 2014;Kusz, 2017;Schimmel, 2017). With its focus on political functions and symbolic implications, such work is crucial to making the case for the independent, irreducible social force of sport in society to scholars and critics who are skeptical of, or dismissive about, it.…”