About

David L. Andrews is a Professor within the Physical Cultural Studies research group in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland. He is also an affiliate faculty member within the Department of American Studies and the Department of Sociology. His research interests center on contextualizing sport and physical culture in relation to the intersecting cultural, political, economic, and technological forces shaping contemporary society. Andrews has authored and edited several books on sport, neoliberalism, and cultural studies, including his forthcoming work titled "The Great Moving Right Show: Sport, Political Assemblages, and the Trump Awakening." Born and raised in South-East London, England, he was educated at the College of St. Mark & St. John and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Sociology of Sport. Prior to joining the University of Maryland in 2001, he taught at the University of Memphis. His scholarly contributions include exploring the militarization of sport science, the representation of women in postfeminist neoliberal contexts, and the political and cultural implications of sport in contemporary society.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Sport consumption across cultures

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-10-02

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• The cultural gentrification of the sneaker: sporting apparel, social media, and digital consumerism in racial capitalism

  Annals of Leisure Research · 2025-03-17

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• Strategies for Success in Scientific Conferences and Publishing

  SPIE eBooks · 2024-12-27

  book1st authorCorresponding

  SPIE Press is the largest independent publisher of optics and photonics books - access our growing scientific eBook collection ranging from monographs, reference works, field guides, and tutorial texts.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>"É nossa, é Do Brasil Inteiro”</i> (It’s Ours, It’s for the Whole of Brazil”): Football, The Yellow Shirt, National Politics, and Conjunctural Contestation

  Leisure Sciences · 2024-08-09 · 1 citations

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  From a resonant and highly mythologized symbol of an imagined national coherence in the 1950s, today the iconic yellow Brazilian football (soccer) shirt–the amarelinha–is an emotive site for political contestation and struggle between the forces of the Brazilian right and left. Within a contemporary Brazilian conjuncture fraught by conjoined political, economic, and cultural schisms, the shirt has become what Stuart Hall (p. 354) referred to as a "constant battlefield" upon which warring national political ideologies and imaginaries have fought for ascendancy. In contextually mapping the shifting and increasingly contentious relationship between the amarelinha and the Brazilian national imaginary, we utilize a critical conjuncturalism in critically explicating three indicative moments: 1) the shirt's historical articulation, and initial relative stasis, as a symbol of a modern Brazilian national unity, pride, and optimism in the period from the 1950s to 2010s; 2) the disarticulation and hijacking of the shirt by an emergent right-wing populist movement during the mid-2010s, vanguarded by future President Jair Bolsonaro, and visibly supported by many popular athletes (i.e. Neymar, Nelson Piquet); and 3) the subsequent rearticulation of the shirt, and indeed the national political imaginary, by the countervailing forces of the Brazilian political left including leading journalists and athletes (i.e. Richarlison, Walter Casagrande). As such, our aim is to contextually examine how the shirt has, in a dialectical sense, become both a product and producer of the ideological and affective schisms responsible for the fraying (yet also potentially rebuilding) of Brazilian national identity and society.

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• Front Matter

  SPIE eBooks · 2024-12-27

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• The Contested Terrain of Sporting Consumption: Navigating Meaning, Identity, and Late Capitalist Marketing through Sneaker Customization

  Social Sciences · 2024-07-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This discussion critically examines and questions assumptions about the meanings and motivations of sporting consumption. We argue that the practice of sneaker customization demonstrates the contested terrain of sporting consumption, wherein contemporary consumerism is characterized by a dynamic interplay between top–down structural determination (by mass commercial forces) and bottom–up creative agency (by everyday consumers). Based on in-depth interviews with 15 sneaker consumers, we narrate the complexities of late capitalist consumer culture through three overlapping “tensions” between the commercial sneaker industry and everyday sneaker consumers: (1) Sneakers as a vehicle to express individuality versus to demonstrate conformity; (2) Sneaker customization as a means of artistic expression versus being a commodity rationalized to maximize profit; (3) An affective versus instrumental attachment to sneakers. Overall, the analysis illuminates how the cultural and affective meanings that consumers attach to sneaker consumption operate; sometimes in conjunction with, more often in opposition to, but always in tension with the meanings that the sneaker industry attempts to embed through its ever-expansive means of marketing and advertising.

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• The Cultural Politics of Sport: Why This, Why Now?

  Journal of Sport and Social Issues · 2024-02-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• FC Barcelona in the United States

  2024-02-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The aim of this chapter is to provide a preliminary examination of FC Barcelona's position within the contemporary US sport market. Utilising an assemblage-oriented, contextual cultural studies approach, the discussion grounds the FC Barcelona phenomenon within the aggregate of determinant forces through which it has come to being as a globally present superclub. This involves an explication of the club's strategic reformation as a transnational sport entertainment corporation in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the commercial and cultural implications of this process. The discussion focuses on the various ways that the club's local identity has been compromised, largely through the influence of its Disneyized commercialised and spectacularised diversification. This process is subsequently explicated within, and through, and examination of FC Barcelona's (re)production in the US, as the corollary of already existing American assemblant forces and relations that have contoured the translated FC Barcelona assemblage's generic and superficial (re)formation within the late capitalist US context. While acknowledging the determinist nature of the analysis, the conclusion points to the sporting implications of the club's forays into the US market, yet also the potential for expressions and experiences of resistance towards the generic banality of the FC Barcelona US’ assemblage.

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• Sport, Advertising and Global Promotional Culture

  2024-12-19 · 2 citations

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• The Contemporary Landscape of Sport Advertising and Promotional Culture

  2024-12-19

  book-chapterSenior author

  This introductory chapter provides an overview of the sports-media-advertising-promotional complex highlighting the unique features of sport as a vehicle for, and within, promotional culture. After briefly outlining the origins and development of advertising as an economic and cultural industry, the chapter offers a discussion of the common theoretical approaches used to understand advertising and its impact on society. In turn, the benefits and limitations of the circuit of culture model is explored as one framework for advancing the critical understanding the complex interrelationships between the production, representation, consumption, and regulation of commodities. Here, we consider the implications of ‘surveillance capitalism’ as an emerging disruptive force that draws upon new architectures of technology that enable unparalleled collation and exploitation of consumer data. This is followed by an overview of the structure of the book along with a summary of the key themes and associated chapters. Finally, the conclusion considers the wider significance of advertising and promotional culture within the new global and political economy.

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Frequent coauthors

• Michael Silk

  Bournemouth University

  31 shared

• David S. Bradshaw

  15 shared

• Steven J. Jackson

  12 shared

• Jacob J. Bustad

  Towson University

  10 shared

• Andrew Grainger

  7 shared

• Cheryl L. Cole

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  6 shared

• Bryan C. Clift

  North Carolina State University

  6 shared

• Michael D. Giardina

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Inducted as a Research Fellow in the North American Society…
• Inducted as a Fellow in the National Academy of Kinesiology…
• Doris W. Sands Award for Teaching Excellence, College of Hea…
• Sport, Physical Culture and the Moving Body: Materialisms, T…