Rate My Professor Steve Jackson

Professor Steve Jackson is a Professor in the School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Otago, specialising in the socio-cultural analysis of sport. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario (Canada) with a BA, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA) with an MS and PhD, he has held visiting professorships at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), University of Jyväskylä (Finland), University of British Columbia and Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), Federal University of Paraná (Brazil), Waseda University (Japan), Shanghai University (China), National Taiwan Normal University (Taiwan), and University of Johannesburg (South Africa). His research interests encompass globalisation and sport, national identity and sport, media and sport, sporting masculinities, sport, culture and alcohol, and sport and advertising as a cultural field. He teaches courses such as SPEX 101: Sport, Science & Society, SPEX 315: Sport Media, and SPEX 460: Advanced Topics in Sport Development.

Jackson has served as past-President of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) and Research Committee 27 of the International Sociological Association (ISA) from 2008 to 2015. He currently holds positions as Associate Dean (Research) and Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Sport Policy & Politics at the University of Otago, and has been a member of New Zealand's Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) panel, as well as a grant reviewer for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Swiss National Science Foundation, South African National Research Foundation, and World Anti-Doping Agency. Among his honors are the New Zealand Ministry of Education Tertiary Teaching Award for Sustained Excellence and the Lifetime Honorary Member Award from ISSA, presented in 2025 at the 60th ISSA World Congress in Korea for his exemplary contributions to socio-cultural inquiry in sport. Key publications include the edited volume CrossFit: Commodity, Community, Contested Terrain (2025, with M.C. Dawson), The Contested Terrain of the New Zealand All Blacks: Rugby, Commerce, and Cultural Politics in the Age of Globalisation (2013, with J. Scherer), and Globalization, Sport and Corporate Nationalism (2010). He is Corresponding Editor of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport and serves on editorial boards for Communication & Sport, Sociology of Sport Journal, and others. His scholarship has garnered over 5,000 citations, influencing sport sociology globally.