Holocene alluvial environments at Barking, Lower Thames Valley (London, UK)

Deposit modelling based on archived borehole logs supplemented by a small number of dedicated boreholes is used to reconstruct the main boundary surfaces and the thickness of the main sediment units within the succession of Holocene alluvial deposits underlying the floodplain in the Barking Reach of the Lower Thames Valley. The basis of the modelling exercise is discussed and the models are used to assess the significance of floodplain relief in determining patterns of sedimentation. This evidence is combined with the results of biostratigraphical and geochronological investigations to reconstruct the environmental conditions associated with each successive stage of floodplain aggradation. The two main factors affecting the history and spatial pattern of Holocene sedimentation are shown to be the regional behaviour of relative sea level and the pattern of relief on the surface of the sub-alluvial, Late Devensian Shepperton Gravel. As is generally the case in the Lower Thames Valley, three main stratigraphic units are recognised, the Lower Alluvium, a peat bed broadly equivalent to the Tilbury III peat of Devoy (1979) and an Upper Alluvium. There is no evidence to suggest that the floodplain was substantially re-shaped by erosion during the Holocene. Instead, the relief inherited from the Shepperton Gravel surface was gradually buried either by the accumulation of peat or by deposition of fine-grained sediment from suspension in standing or slow-moving water. The palaeoenvironmental record from Barking confirms important details of the Holocene record observed elsewhere in the Lower Thames Valley, including the presence of Taxus in the valley-floor fen carr woodland between about 5000 and 4000 cal BP, and the subsequent growth of Ulmus on the peat surface.

All part of the hetero-normative? Women football fans` voices on players` sexual (mis)conduct

From interviews conducted in Victoria with women fans of Australian Rules Football, this paper examines their perceptions and rationalisations of alleged sexual misconduct by players. The paper is situated in the seeming contradiction of women avidly supporting male dominated sports despite players being implicated in misconduct against their gender. Women fans' voices about the reported misconduct are explored. These fall into two main categories that are referred to as the 'predatory female' and the 'rogue male' narratives. The former suggests that the sexual assertiveness of some women - the 'groupies' - unlocks men's primal sexuality. The latter points to footballers being immersed in a hyper-masculine sub-culture that predisposes them to treat women in an arbitrary, demeaning manner. The fans' voices, while condemning players' misconduct, suggest that predatory females, by actively seeking out footballers, become victims
because they trigger testosterone driven male responses. Rogue male behaviour is deprecated, but understood as stemming from masculine ways, accentuated by team bonding, that leads some individuals into misconduct, possibly as a means of emphasising their masculinity within their group. Explaining player misconduct in these ways enables fans to distance themselves from it and continue their passionate support of
football.

A victory for the fans? Melbourne's new football club in recent historical perspective

A new Association football team, Melbourne Victory, was created in Melbourne in 2005 as a founding member of the Australian A-League. Within little more than a year it was drawing peak crowds of 50,000 to matches and averaged over 30,000. It was forced to move from an 18,000 capacity stadium to one holding 55,000. Previous new club foundations in the 1990s had not been successful, despite being associated with popular Australian Rules football teams, Collingwood and Carlton. The Victory, however, seems to have attracted a different and wider demographic to the game. For the first time the growth of the code in Australia in based on the domestic population, not waves of inward migration as was the case in the 1880s, 1920s and the post-Second World War period. Preliminary studies of the fan base suggest that the future for the Victory is likely to be different from the recent past.

Football's world cup and its fans - reflections on national styles : a photo essay on Germany 2006

The football World Cup is the greatest multicultural sporting extravaganza of modern times. The notion of post-fandom tries to capture the ways in which fans now participate in and engage in self-aware and reflexive strategies to obtain their desired outcomes from attendance at or viewing such major events. This illustrated photo-essay on the World Cup looks at the experiences and behaviour of fans in three countries, Scotland, Germany and Australia, during the tournament with a view to extending our understanding of the relationships between fans and others temporarily interested in the World Cup and the promoters of such mega-events. It argues that the participants brought a wide range of expectations to the tournament and engaged in highly flexible and innovative approaches to ensure that they gained the maximum benefit, individually and collectively, from the experience.

Industries, artists, friends and fans : marketing young adult fictions online

The Internet has facilitated the coming together of formerly more separated youth taste cultures, such that literary, screen and graphic fandoms now more readily overlap. Media industries have invested in online strategies which create an ongoing relationship between producers and consumers of entertainment media texts. Using the Internet marketing campaign for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as a case study, the paper examines the role of the publishing industry in marketing popular teen literary fiction through online channels in ways that often disguise promotional intent.

Women as consumers of a male domain : Australian Rules Football and its female fans

Looked at from a global perspective, sports are mostly male preserves. Those played by women seldom attract a large spectatorship and the numerous at-ground viewers of men’s play mostly are men. An exception is Australian Rules Football (AFL), a male sport that since the 19th century has drawn a considerable female following, with women accounting for about half of the ‘live’ crowds. From single-person and focus group interviews conducted with female AFL fans, we examine how women voice their support for a sport characterised by hyper-masculinity in players’ on-field and off-field behaviours, in the organisation and control of the sport, and in the ‘natural’ authority credited to men’s voices in commentary and interpretation of it. Given their marginalisation in AFL and in sports generally, what do women fans gain from their avid support of AFL and how does this influence the construction of their identities as women? We examine these issues from a perspective supporting the idea of multiple, fragmented identities.

Drinkers, non-drinkers and deferrers : reconsidering the beer/footy couplet amongst Australian rules football fans

There is a common perception that football and alcohol go hand in hand and that players and fans routinely engage in excessive and irresponsible drinking. In Australia, this is manifest in the stereotypical ‘Pissed Aussie Rules fan’. Following research with Australian Rules football fans in South Australia, we identified three categories of fans according to their (non)engagement with alcohol: Drinkers, Non-Drinkers and Deferrers. Deferrers were selfidentified drinkers who separated alcohol consumption from spectating, for fear of ‘contamination’. Our identification of counter-stereotypic ways in which fans engage with alcohol (or not) challenges the assumptive worlds in which popular commentary on football and drinking operates. This was, to our knowledge, the first ethnography of drinking behaviour amongst Australian Rules football fans. It demonstrates the advantage of using ethnographic research techniques to understand the relationship between identity and consumption.

Oh yes, he is hot : female football fans and the sexual objectification of sportsmen’s bodies

The past decade has witnessed a growing focus on the study of women sports fans within the social sciences and related disciplines. Emerging from and responding to the historical marginalization of women in sport and the bias towards the male fan in literature on sports spectatorship, critical research on women spectators serves the valuable function of illuminating “women’s everyday experiences of being a sports fan” (Gosling 2007: 250). This chapter considers one aspect of women’s participation as followers of male sports, namely, the extent to which female fans partake in the sexual objectification of sportsmen. We aim to assess how looking at male athletes in sexually desiring ways impacts on the individual and collective construction of women’s gender and sports fan identities.

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.