'Fencing them in' : the A-league, policing and the dilemma of public order

The establishment of an elite national Australian soccer league has been accompanied by an unprecedented growth in popularity for the world game in several Australian cities. Such growth presents numerous challenges for public order maintenance, particularly in light of the widespread concern over the relationship between soccer, disasters in major closed venues and violence. After outlining the emerging issues, and the extant Australian research into the phenomena of policing and sports crowd disorder, this study offers a knowledge based approach to foster informed, reflective and collaborative policing in elite and sub-elite soccer venues. Rather than advocating a fundamental shift in the current public order policing paradigm, we suggest drawing on elements of best practice that are currently adopted in other Australian sporting and public order settings and appropriate overseas experience to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics of Australian soccer fandom. The result should be the promotion of safer yet exciting events at which interactive crowd management based on harm minimization principles are key features.

Finding footy : female fan socialization and Australian rules football

The question of how, irrespective of gender, a person becomes a sports fan has been absent in sociological studies of sports supporters. Distinct from other studies of sport spectatorship that focus on the practices of already existing (and overwhelmingly male) fans, our research is the first to consider how women become supporters, and in doing so, it begins to redress the significant under-representation of women in sports fan research. From interviews with female supporters of the Australian Football League (AFL), this article identifies and critically assesses the modes by which women come to support sport. We propose four categories to explain the different ways women accomplish fandom, focusing on the importance of strong social ties and doxic actions in this process. The events, experiences and social relations that inform women's first encounters with AFL offers a template for the wider consideration of women as social agents in the sporting landscape.

It’s timey wimey for a female doctor

A discussion of fandom's resistance to seeing a woman cast as 'the Doctor' in the popular science fiction television show 'Doctor Who'.

Celebrity and public persona

Research on celebrity and public persona derives from fundamentally interdisciplinary sources. Although at its core, the study of public personality has been the object of investigations by those more closely associated with media and communication, the key disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, social psychology, and even anthropology and history have been part of its analysis. Celebrity identifies the “extra-textual” dimensions of the famous, in which the lives of the renowned are followed, read, and reported. It is a public celebration of individuality that is (but not exclusively) connected to consumer culture and democratic capitalism. Through these larger cultural tropes celebrity has had its strongest affiliations with the contemporary entertainment industries, particularly in terms of how they are covered by the media and the press for further value beyond the cultural forms that are often the origins of stardom—the public individual’s performances in fields such as film, television, sport, and popular music. Celebrity is a site of celebration and derogation in any culture: these public individuals are truly exalted and given a status beyond others, but they are also ridiculed for their believed-to-be unearned credentials for having such a public platform and voice. Moreover, the study of celebrity and public persona is also an investigation into the connection between the populace and these public personalities, where parasocial relations most evident in fandom identify how celebrities embody audiences with an affective connection that is truly powerful in contemporary culture. That power of embodiment and connection that celebrities possess is subsequently exploited by the media industries to promote and sell new connected cultural products. Identifying celebrities as part of a spectrum of public personas links the study of celebrity to the investigation of the celebrated and famed in a variety of professions and fields well beyond entertainment. Thus, the term persona is used in these studies of public personalities to acknowledge the mask that is deployed to present a public version of the self for this external consumption and reading by an audience, a collective, a network, a nation, a citizenry, or a community. Research into public personas has led to related studies of political leadership, self-branding, notoriety in business, and reputation management, and research delves into the presentation of the public self by greater portions of the populace in online cultures. Celebrity and public persona is a field in which research aims to investigate the significance and meaning of various versions of the public self in both contemporary culture and historically.

Digital shimmer: popular music and the intimate nexus between fan and star

Conception of ‘star performance’ through popular music is stratified which generates diverse and often contradictory forms of thought. For example, stars and celebrities plausibly act as a ‘culture medium’ in which, through imagination, one’s identity is assembled, realised or constructed. What to become and how to be are questions we individually and collectively contend with throughout our lives to varying degrees (Maslow, 1954; 1968). Predominant use of digital technologies has seen the delivery of sound much altered. Music, be it Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata or Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast, once sourced via analogue legacy devices such as ‘old-school’ tape cassette or vinyl record is now a series of zero and one digits. Advocates argue that the key benefit of digitalisation is the ability to compress data because sound generates large files of information. The discourse of digitalisation begs the question of how a series of ones and zeros, albeit in a plethora of configurations, registers with listening bodies and affects ‘the sublime’. It is without doubt that some musical experiences afford indescribable, unlocatable sensation—even enchantment (as defined by Bennett, 2001: 5 and called forth by Redmond: 2014: 126). Such musical experiences might be in the presence of the performer or in their absence such as in the case of recorded music. In this context, any sense of ’real’ space and place is less definitive allowing for ‘special encounters’ to be imagined and felt. For these reasons, music and all that the use of the word might convey, the proposed notion of phaino-ken here, acts as the lens through which to examine the meaning and value of celebrity and star embodiment.

Semantic shock: David Bowie!

David Bowie embodies certain identity positions that are alien, alternative, and transgressive via metaphor and alter-egos that render him essentially strange. This chapter argues that by using metaphor and metonym throughout his visual and sonic creations, David Bowie has been largely freed from the constraints of merely describing the world; his use of metaphor and metonym have afforded possible reevaluations of the world, in new ways, by breaking the association between language and things. His own sonic and visual assemblage have allowed fissures to be created; new and multiple meanings rendered possible and valid, with his work going beyond both the creator and viewing/listening-body. Using Sara Ahmed’s (2004) social philosophies of trauma and scarring, the chapter argues that what David Bowie’s work frequently does is ‘re-open wounds’ and reminds us of the scars; asking us to notice their existence, to become more aware, in the first instance. But then, offers a means to negotiate their healing.

New approaches for studies of Muslim women and sport

This article offers a new approach for examining Muslim women in sport, which combines the domains of sporting participation, consumption and representation. It proposes moving beyond a sports development paradigm and deficit model of sports participation, whereby marginal communities are incorporated into the mainstream by playing sport, to take account of other ways that people engage with sport as consumers and fans. Conceptually, this approach is informed by transnational feminist perspectives, which foreground the role of power hierarchies in the production of knowledge about the sporting female Other. It suggests that sport practitioners, scholars and policy makers pay greater theoretical attention to how Muslim women are constructed within sport discourses. By widening the research focus to consider consumption and representation, possibilities emerge to expand on the narrow research and policy fields of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘well-being’ focused on physical health outcomes through which Muslim women’s engagement with sport is commonly framed.

Advertising the 2015 Cricket World Cup: representing multicultural female sports fans

Intersectional accounts of how women sports fans from diverse cultural backgrounds are represented remain largely unconsidered in fandom literature. This article examines an Australian advertisement for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, which features as its main protagonists female cricket fans supporting a variety of countries. It makes use of a transnational feminist cultural studies paradigm to frame a discussion of how commercial sports media narratives situate these fans as ‘‘ordinary.’’ In considering how the multicultural female sports fan is configured as ordinary in the Australian sporting context, I demonstrate the ways In which narratives of gender and nation are mobilized to situate multicultural women as marginal to both the Australian nation and cricket, despite the prominence given to ethnically diverse women in the advertisement. This manoeuvre, I argue, responds to the cultural and economic transformations of cricket globally, simultaneously denying and universalizing difference as a mechanism to assuage the anxieties generated by the decentering of Western power in international cricket.

The passion plays of celebrity culture

If there is a cultural arena today where passion plays a central and heightened role, then it is in the affecting and textural operations of celebrity. Celebrity representations are crafted out of passionate aesthetic signifiers and impassioned pleas to the senses, to the emotions and to the exaggerations of feeling that the consumer or fan is asked to register and then fully embody. Celebrity culture attempts to turn one into a passionate creature, ruled by the heart, lost in a sea of desires and desiring wants and needs, as the adoring figure that moves us, moves intimately before us. Such passions can and do go unrequited, of course; some are resisted and rejected, and some celebrity passions register as fully carnal and liberating encounters. That is to say, the plays of celebrity passion serve (hetero) normative and policed accounts of feeling and belonging in the world, fuel a desire for commodity objects and material possessions, and yet also open up the possibility for engagements that are violent, liberal and unregulated. In this article, I will explore the ways in which celebrity culture engages with passion and through the idea of it involving a modern form of the passion play. Following Lauren Berlant, I will argue that the passion ignited by the celebrity works to contain and regulate desire, and yet also offers up the opportunity for sensorial engagements that violate and resist the normative terms of desiring. I will suggest celebrity figures are themselves caught up in this passion play, suffering and feeling deeply at the same time, while channelling this violent crisis to their fans as they do so. Finally, I will write the article passionately, from an impassioned perspective, measuring and weighting my own desires in the contradictions and tensions of passion as they emerge in the body of the writer before you. This article is part of a themed issue entitled ‘Passion’.

Vidding Grrls. Pratiche di remix audiovisivo nella cultura digitale contemporanea

La pratica del remix è al giorno d’oggi sempre più diffusa e un numero sempre più vasto di persone ha ora le competenze e gli strumenti tecnologici adeguati per eseguire operazioni un tempo riservate a nicchie ristrette. Tuttavia, nella sua forma audiovisiva, il remix ha ottenuto scarsa attenzione a livello accademico. Questo lavoro esplora la pratica del remix intesa al contempo come declinazione contemporanea di una pratica di lungo corso all’interno della storia della produzione audiovisiva – ovvero il riuso di immagini – sia come forma caratteristica della contemporaneità mediale, atto di appropriazione grassroots dei contenuti mainstream da parte degli utenti. La tesi si articola in due sezioni. Nella prima, l’analisi di tipo teorico e storico-critico è suddivisa in due macro-aree di intervento: da una parte il remix inteso come pratica, atto di appropriazione, gesto di riciclo, decontestualizzazione e risemantizzazione delle immagini mediali che ha attraversato la storia dei media audiovisivi [primo capitolo]. Dall’altra, la remix culture, ovvero il contesto culturale e sociale che informa l’ambiente mediale entro il quale la pratica del remix ha conosciuto, nell’ultimo decennio, la diffusione capillare che lo caratterizza oggi [secondo capitolo]. La seconda, che corrisponde al terzo capitolo, fornisce una dettagliata panoramica su un caso di studio, la pratica del fan vidding. Forma di remix praticata quasi esclusivamente da donne, il vidding consiste nel creare fan video a partire da un montaggio d’immagini tratte da film o serie televisive che utilizza come accompagnamento musicale una canzone. Le vidders, usando specifiche tecniche di montaggio, realizzano delle letture critiche dei prodotti mediali di cui si appropriano, per commentare, criticare o celebrare gli oggetti di loro interesse. Attraverso il vidding il presente lavoro indaga le tattiche di rielaborazione e riscrittura dell’immaginario mediale attraverso il riuso di immagini, con particolare attenzione al remix inteso come pratica di genere.

The Perception of American Adolescent Culture Through the Dubbing and Fansubbing of a Selection of US Teen Series from 1990 to 2013

The present dissertation aims at analyzing the construction of American adolescent culture through teen-targeted television series and the shift in perception that occurs as a consequence of the translation process. In light of the recent changes in television production and consumption modes, largely caused by new technologies, this project explores the evolution of Italian audiences, focusing on fansubbing (freely distributed amateur subtitles made by fans for fan consumption) and social viewing (the re-aggregation of television consumption based on social networks and dedicated platforms, rather than on physical presence). These phenomena are symptoms of a sort of ‘viewership 2.0’ and of a new type of active viewing, which calls for a revision of traditional AVT strategies. Using a framework that combines television studies, new media studies, and fandom studies with an approach to AVT based on Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995), this dissertation analyzes the non-Anglophone audience’s growing need to participation in the global dialogue and appropriation process based on US scheduling and informed by the new paradigm of convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and affective economics (Jenkins 2006 and 2007), as well as the constraints intrinsic to multimodal translation and the different types of linguistic and cultural adaptation performed through dubbing (which tends to be more domesticating; Venuti 1995) and fansubbing (typically more foreignizing). The study analyzes a selection of episodes from six of the most popular teen television series between 1990 and 2013, which has been divided into three ages based on the different modes of television consumption: top-down, pre-Internet consumption (Beverly Hills, 90210, 1990 – 2000), emergence of audience participation (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997 – 2003; Dawson’s Creek, 1998 – 2003), age of convergence and Viewership 2.0 (Gossip Girl, 2007 – 2012; Glee, 2009 – present; The Big Bang Theory, 2007 - present).

Sangre fresca publicitaria: True Blood y las transfusiones de la ficción

El artículo analiza el concepto de transmedia storytelling en su dimensión publicitaria. En cierto modo, las narrativas transmediáticas, esto es, la diseminación de las tramas ficcionales a lo largo de soportes y plataformas diversos pero sinérgicos (letra impresa, cine, televisión) fueron empleadas en primer lugar en el mensaje publicitario, obligado a transmigrar por su carencia de un soporte exclusivo y a cambio por la vocación de colonizarlos a todos. Hoy día es el producto cultural ficcional el que devuelve a la publicidad el préstamo: son los universos ficcionales los marcos más propiciatorios para el consumo, no sólo de la cultura industrial en sí, en cualquiera de sus soportes, sino de todo un rosario de marcas arracimadas en torno a la narrativa ficcional. Analizaremos en detalle este fenómeno en una teleserie norteamericana muy reciente, True Blood (HBO, 2008), todavía en emisión, y en todo el universo ficcional que orbita a su alrededor. La diferencia entre los productos culturales en sí y las piezas publicitarias encargadas de promocionarlos –como ya vio premonitoriamente Adorno- se disuelve en un continuo cross-promotional, que tiende a enmascarar también los límites entre las estrategias corporativas y las intervenciones del fan.

South Africa and the global game:football, apartheid and beyond

Firmly situating South African teams, players, and associations in the international framework in which they have to compete, South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010. Written by an eminent team of scholars, this special issue and book aims to examine the importance of football in South African society, revealing how the black oppression transformed a colonial game into a force for political, cultural and social liberation. It explores how the hosting of the 2010 World Cup aims to enhance the prestige of the post-apartheid nation, to generate economic growth and stimulate Pan-African pride. Among the themes dealt with are race and racism, class and gender dynamics, social identities, mass media and culture, and globalization. This collection of original and insightful essays will appeal to specialists in African Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sport Studies, as well as to non-specialist readers seeking to inform themselves ahead of the 2010 World Cup. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society. 1. Introduction Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann Part 1: Past is Prologue – History of Football in South Africa 2. Football as Code: The Social Diffusion of ‘Soccer’ in South Africa Lloyd Hill 3. White Football in South Africa: Empire, Apartheid and Change, 1892 – 1977 Chris Bolsmann 4. A Biography of Darius Dhlomo: Transnational Footballer in the Era of Apartheid Peter Alegi 5. Women and Gender in South African Soccer Cynthia Fabrizio Pelak Part 2: Football Culture after Apartheid: Local and Transnational Dynamics 6. "You Must Support Chiefs: Pirates Already Have Two White Fans!" Race and Racial Discourse in South African Football Fandom Marc Fletcher 7. "It wasn’t that I did not like South African Football": Media, History, and Biography Sean Jacobs 8. Soccer in a Rugby Town: Restructuring Football in Stellenbosch Sylvain Cubizolles 9. Differing Trajectories: Football Development and Patterns of Player Migration in South Africa and Ghana Paul Darby and Eirik Solberg Part 3: The 2010 World Cup: Challenges and Opportunities 10. Football's Tsars: Proprietorship, Corporatism and Politics in the 2010 FIFA World Cup Scarlett Cornelissen 11. Sports as Cultural Diplomacy: The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa’s Foreign Policy Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu 12. World Cup 2010: Africa’s Turn or the Turn on Africa? Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed 13. The 2010 FIFA World Cup: Critical Voices From Below Percy Ngonyama.

Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics

This is the first book of critical essays devoted to post-punk legends Mark E Smith and the Fall, examining the group form a number of different perspectives, including their relations with Manchester and the North, post-punk aesthetics cultural politics, fandom and contemporary media. As John Peel famously said, this group was 'always different, yet always the same', and deserving of more academic attention than they have so far received.

Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.