About Ben Carrington
Introduction
Professor Ben Carrington is an internationally renowned British sociologist currently teaching and writing in Los Angeles, California. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading scholars on the sociology of race and culture, especially in relation to popular culture, politics and sport. He has given keynote talks on these topics in North America, the Caribbean and across much of Europe and regularly appears in the English-speaking news media discussing questions related to race, politics, sport and culture. In his research and teaching he demonstrates the powerful role of culture in shaping our identities and the sociological and political significance of popular culture in our everyday lives. He has shown, in other words, why sports matter so much and his work has challenged mainstream academia and sociology in particular to put an understanding of sports at the center rather than at the margins of how we understand the world today.
Background & Early Life
He was born in Woolwich, south London in the early 1970s and grew up in Thamesmead, one of Europe’s largest post-World War Two “planned” new towns, or what are referred to in England as “council estates”. Thamesmead was dubbed at the time of its conception in the 1960s as a “town of the twenty-first century” and was the backdrop for Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian film “A Clockwork Orange”. After Charlton Athletic Football Club, then in the top flight of English football, made the disastrous decision not to take him on as a professional footballer in the late 1980s (a decision many experts believe Charlton Athletic never recovered from), he stayed in education and discovered the discipline of Sociology, that he studied for his A-Levels. This would be the start of his life-long interest in thinking sociologically about the world, about politics and about sports in particular.
After his A-Levels, and with his youthful desire to become a professional football player fading away, he went on to Loughborough University, arguably Britain's foremost university for the study of sports, where he completed an undergraduate degree in Sports Management. His undergraduate dissertation explored the late 1980s/early 1990s house music, or “rave” scene, and sparked his interest in thinking seriously about the changing meanings and politics of popular culture. Encouraged by his mentor, the leisure policy theorist Professor Ian Henry, to continue his studies, Ben Carrington applied to the graduate program at the Carnegie School at Leeds Beckett University. At Leeds he was supervised by the leading leisure studies experts Professor Sheila Scraton and Dr. Peter Bramham where he completed his PhD on the role of sport as a form of cultural politics within black communities.
Academic Career & Research
After his years as a graduate student in Leeds, where he also became a semi-professional football player, in 1997 Ben Carrington got his first academic job teaching Sport Studies at the renowned “Chelsea School” at Brighton University. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, along with leading Sports Studies scholars such as Alan Tomlinson, John Sugden, Graham McFee, P. David Howe, Gill Lines, Jayne Caudwell, Belinda Wheaton, Dan Burdsey and Ian McDonald, he helped to establish the Chelsea School as one of the preeminent academic centers in Britain for the critical study of sports, leisure and popular culture. He continued his semi-professional football career, playing for Worthing F.C. and enjoyed many successful seasons with the Sussex-based club. In 2004 he left England to take up a position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin where he received tenure in 2010, and where he worked for thirteen years.
In 2017 he left Austin, just before California’s tech billionaires moved to Texas to save money on their taxes, thereby ruining what had made Austin great and weird in the first place, and joined the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California where he currently holds the title of Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism. Outside of Annenberg, Ben Carrington remains actively engaged with a range of intellectual spaces at USC and holds courtesy appointments with the Department of Sociology and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.
Public Scholarship, Media and Current Projects
He has published numerous articles on race, culture and politics, as well as four books, including the critically-acclaimed Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage, 2010). In addition to his scholarly publications, he has written op-eds for publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post and he has contributed to many sports documentaries such as Glenn Kaino’s film on the life and legacy of athlete Tommie Smith, With Drawn Arms (2020) and the Sky Sports documentary Bruno v Tyson (2021). In 2017 Ben Carrington wrote and produced a radio documentary for NPR on the life and legacy of the Jamaican-born British sociologist and public intellectual Stuart Hall, titled Stuart Hall: In Conversations. In 2024, Ben Carrington won the American Sociological Association’s “Stuart Hall Award for Advancing the Study of Racial or Ethnic Inequality”. He is currently working on two book-length projects: one, partly inspired by the work of C.L.R. James, is on black cultural politics, cricket and the Caribbean diaspora (part of his project to get Americans to understand the sport of cricket better) and the second book is a sociological analysis on the state of contemporary American society and politics based on his two decades living and working in America (part of his project to get the rest of the world to better understand America).
Despite retiring from semi-professional football when he left England, after a modestly successful career playing for the likes of Farsley Celtic and Guiseley AFC in the north and with Worthing FC in the south, Ben Carrington can still be found tormenting defenses (and referees) on the pitches in and around Los Angeles. Though not quite at the same pace that he used to.
