“The I in Team takes up a timely and important—and interesting—topic. It aims to understand sports fandom in relation to social identity, most saliently race, gender, and economic condition. In so doing, it illuminates controversial contemporary phenomena like our debates around racialized sport iconography—team names like 'Redskins'—and a majority white society’s peculiar and ambivalent investments in black male athletes. This is a book I’d want to teach and to read.”
— Paul C. Taylor, Pennsylvania State University
“This is a very interesting book, unusual and clearly relevant to many people’s lives—especially those who are not sports fans but are surrounded by them. Tarver explores how sports and our relations to sports and communities of teams and fans shape our social world more broadly—a very important issue, well worth philosophical attention. I know of no other text that brings Foucault to bear on sports culture. There is really nothing like this in the literature.”
— Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond
"[A] detailed account of how sports fandom creates and reproduces identity in contemporary (principally American) society.... Players will be practicing through the dog days of summer. Fans should stay busy, too — we have some important preseason reading to do."
— Chronicle of Higher Education
"Given that spectator sports are both massively popular and a major source of identity for fans, The I in Team demonstrates why we ought to take them far more seriously."
— Times Higher Education
"The I in Team is an impressive and careful piece of scholarship. Although the book will be of greatest immediate interest to people working in the philosophy of sport, its import goes beyond disciplinary boundaries. The book makes a significant, original, and much needed contribution to feminist philosophy. . . . Erin C. Tarver has done a fine job of uncovering the oppressive ills of mascotting and sketching the outline of an alternative feminist model of sports fandom."
— Hypatia Reviews
"This is an excellent book that should encourage us all to think far more deeply about the importance of fandom and the moral risks it brings...After all, Tarver makes clear why this is important: fandom is a constituent of our very identities."
— Jake Wojtowicz, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport