Search results for ""author rayvon fouché""

We like to think of sports as elemental: strong bodies trained to overcome height, weight, distance; the thrill of earned victory or the agony of defeat in a contest decided on a level playing field. But in Game Changer, Rayvon Fouche argues that sports have been radically shaped by an explosion of scientific and technological advances in materials, training, nutrition, and medicine dedicated to making athletes stronger and faster. Technoscience, as Fouche dubs it, increasingly gives the edge (however slight) to the athlete with the latest gear, the most advanced training equipment, or the performance-enhancing drugs that are hardest to detect. In this revealing book, Fouche examines a variety of sports paraphernalia and enhancements, from fast suits, athletic shoes, and racing bicycles to basketballs and prosthetic limbs. He also takes a hard look at gender verification testing, direct drug testing, and the athlete biological passport in an attempt to understand the evolving place of technoscience across sport. In this book, Fouche: * Examines the relationship among sport, science, and technology* Considers what is at stake in defining sporting culture by its scientific knowledge and technology* Provides readers and students with an informative and engagingly written study Focusing on well-known athletes, including Michael Phelps, Oscar Pistorius, Caster Semenya, Usain Bolt, and Lance Armstrong, Fouche argues that technoscience calls into question the integrity of games, records, and our bodies themselves. He also touches on attempts by sporting communities to regulate the use of technology, from elite soccer's initial reluctance to utilize goal-line technology to automobile racing's endless tweaking of regulatory formulas in an attempt to blur engineering potency and reclaim driver skill and ability. Game Changer will change the way you look at sports-and the outsized impact technoscience has on them.

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According to the stereotype, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marveling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers. In this pathbreaking study, Rayvon Fouche examines the life and work of three African Americans: Granville Woods (1856-1910), an independent inventor; Lewis Latimer (1848-1928), a corporate engineer with General Electric; and Shelby Davidson (1868-1930), who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department. Detailing the difficulties and human frailties that make their achievements all the more impressive, Fouche explains how each man used invention for financial gain, as a claim on entering adversarial environments, and as a means to technical stature in a Jim Crow institutional setting. Describing how Woods, Latimer, and Davidson struggled to balance their complicated racial identities-as both black and white communities perceived them-with their hopes of being judged solely on the content of their inventive work, Fouche provides a nuanced view of African American contributions to-and relationships with-technology during a period of rapid industrialization and mounting national attention to the inequities of a separate-but-equal social order.

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