Adam Beissel is Associate Professor of Sport Leadership & Management at Miami University, Ohio, USA. Adam’s research and scholarship interrogates the political economy of international sport events and the geopolitics of sport. In addition to his research involving the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, he’s currently working on a research project exploring the geopolitics of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Twitter: @extrabeisshit Verity Postlethwaite is Doctoral Prize Fellow at Loughborough University, UK, and Research Associate in the Japan Research Centre at SOAS. Verity’s main interests focus on how sport events and other cultural entities have been used in local, national, and international contexts to influence the governing of society, in particular around notions of inclusivity. Her recent research focuses on important aspects of gender, sustainability, and disability. Twitter: @verity_pos Andrew Grainger is Senior Lecturer in the sociology of sport and sport development in the School of Sport, Exercise and Nutrition at Massey University, New Zealand. Andy’s research and teaching focus primarily on the globalisation of sport and the impact of neoliberal ideology and practices on local physical cultural meanings and practices. His current research explores the intersections of sport policy, sport diplomacy, and women’s football in Aotearoa New Zealand. Twitter: @Andy_D_Grainger Julie E. Brice is Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University Fullerton, USA. Julie’s research and scholarship focuses on the socio-cultural and political forces that impact women’s experiences of their moving bodies and across women’s sports, more broadly. This includes explorations into the activewear phenomenon and women’s fitness, New Zealand women’s experiences of wellbeing and sport, and promotional messaging of the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT). Twitter: @jubrice5
'In conjoined sporting, social, cultural, economic, political, and/or geographical terms, The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup: Politics, Representation, & Management aggregates an intriguing and multifaceted understanding of an event which occupies an increasingly prominent place within the global sporting landscape. As much a collective research project as an edited anthology (one or more of the editors are involved in the overwhelming majority of the chapters), The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup makes an important contribution to the sporting mega-event literature. It provides a vivid and interdisciplinary reading of the tournament’s location, structure, and representation which, albeit long overdue, finally brings the FIFA Women’s World Cup under the critical academic spotlight warranted by its manifold significance. Furthermore, without resorting to any form of uncritical romanticism, the book suggests how the Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand co-hosted 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament’s more progressive aspects offer something of a counterpoint to the entrenched orthodoxies of major sporting events more generally. A must-read for anyone with a serious interest in the complexities, and transformative potentialities, of contemporary sport culture.' David L. Andrews, Professor of Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland - College Park, USA