ABSTRACT
When I go to re-read Scott Fleming’s 1995 book ‘Home and Away’: Sport and South Asian Male Youth in my university library, the fi rst thing I notice about the copy I fi nd is that this is a book that has been well used by students of Leeds Metropolitan University over many years. I know I am one lecturer here who still includes the book on reading lists and who still tells dissertation students interested in sport, ‘race’ and racism, or ethnographies of sport and education, to take this book out and read it wisely. No one has yet written a critical ethnography of sport and the intersectionalities of identity that has surpassed it. This is probably partly because the book was published at a time when publishers were still keen to publish books based on Ph.D. theses – since the late 1990s, it has been unusual to see ethnographic research in sociology of sport of the depth, richness and quality that only comes from a sustained Ph.D. study published in book form; and these days students who do cash in their theses for the title of ‘Doctor’ are encouraged to carve up their work into smaller journal articles. But another reason for the sustained importance and relevance of the book is its uniqueness of content: what we get from Fleming is the messy reality of doing ethnography with young people, navigating through the gatekeepers and the ethical problems, and providing a full and honest appraisal of the process. The book is an inspiration to those of us who want to provide similar ‘thick’ accounts of the multiplicity of practices and people in sport and leisure, and the complexities and tensions of power and structures that work like cobwebs between the people and organizations in our research.
