179 research outputs found
Professor Alan Tomlinson: The Importance of Being Critical’
No full textOn his own LinkedIn profile, this how Alan Tomlinson surveys his own work and its contribution to sociology of leisure:
Alan Tomlinson is Emeritus Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, UK, where he has worked since 1975. Tomlinson studied humanities and sociology at the University of Kent (BA 1971), gained a PGCE (English and Social Studies 1972), and studied for an MA (1973) and a DPhil (1977) in Sociological Studies (sociology of art/literature) at the University of Sussex. His interdisciplinary background has included social and cultural histories of working-class sport forms, studies of international sporting events and their power dynamics, and analyses of sport media. He has published more than 150 articles, book chapters, reports and books, and is especially well-known for his historically-based work on the making and reporting of large-scale sporting ceremonies and events, which has featured on numerous national and international radio and television broadcasts. He has edited the journals Leisure Studies and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. He co-founded Brighton’s programme in Sport Journalism, and led the Sport and Leisure Cultures (SLC) research group to the forefront of international scholarship in the field. His research has been supported by the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the European Commission, the Sports Council/Sport England, the South East England Development Agency, the Central Council for Physical Recreation, and numerous regional and local authorities. He has supervised 31 PhDs and 6 MPhils to successful completion, examined 37 doctoral theses, and reviewed for research councils in the UK, Denmark, Canada and Australia. Professor Tomlinson is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS, UK), an inaugural NASSS Research Fellow (North American Society for the Sociology of Sport), a long-term member of the British Sociological Association and the Leisure Studies Association, and a full member of the Sports Journalists' Association.
My own introduction to Alan Tomlinson happened when I attended a British Sociological Association conference at Reading, where I presented with Ben Carrington some of our research findings on racism in rugby league (Long et al., 1997). Tomlinson proved to be a strong defender of sociology of leisure and the critical, Marxist tradition in leisure studies, and was an inspiration to me when I returned to full-time academic work in 2004. I used his work teaching my students about the meaning and purpose of leisure – and about the commodification of sports events. I then cited his work in my first two monographs, where I identified his contribution to the Marxist turn in leisure studies (Spracklen, 2009, 2011). In my times as a member of the Leisure Studies Association’s Executive Committee I came to know him personally and professionally. Tomlinson was through that time a strong advocate of the sociology of leisure, leisure studies and the sociology of sport. His critical lens was something we all emulated. Tomlinson challenged everyone to think more clearly and critically about the problem of leisure: who gets to have leisure? How much freedom do we have in a late modern, capitalist society, where every form of leisure is commodified? These are the questions Tomlinson tried to get all of us to think about, even as his later career focussed on sports events and the unethical practices that surround them (Allison & Tomlinson, 2017; Sugden & Tomlinson, 2002, 2017; Tomlinson, 2014; Tomlinson & Young, 2006).
In this chapter I want to do three things. First of all, I explore Tomlinson’s entire professional career as a scholar of the sociology of leisure and the theoretical lenses he used, drawing on an interview he did with the editors of the journal Leisure Studies (Andrews, 2006). Second, I focus on one edited collection of his, Consumption, Identity and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure (Tomlinson, 1990a) to see how the trends he and the other chapter authors identified have emerged. Finally, in a short conclusion, I argue that Tomlinson’s later interest in trying to get the sports industry to become more moral, while laudable, overlooked the fact that modern sport may in fact be too much of a tool of modern capitalism and he has missed the chance to argue for the importance of leisure spaces and acts as sites of resistance
Intelligent Equalisation Principles and Techniques for Minimising Masking when Mixing the Extreme Modern Metal Genre.
No full textThe intensity, complexity and energy of performance, combined with the power and density of the tones involved are characteristics of the extreme metal genre. These characteristics present numerous problems when striving to achieve the clarity, definition and hyper-realism of performance required for this genres production. Avoiding masking in a mix is a fundamental
aspect of clarity, definition, intelligibility and perceived loudness and due to the fact that masking especially occurs in a dense mix, and is more pronounced in low frequencies, is particularly applicable to mixing the downtuned extreme metal genre. Masking in simple terms is the ability of frequencies of one sound to obscure or inhibit (i.e. mask) the frequencies of
another sound. This paper will draw upon the first author’s eight years of experience producing within the metal genre, including releases through Sony and Universal and working with the likes of Colin Richardson and Andy Sneap
Dreaming of drams: Authenticity in Scottish whisky tourism as an expression of unresolved Habermasian rationalities
No full textIn this paper, the production of whisky tourism at both independently owned and corporately owned distilleries in Scotland is explored by focusing on four examples (Arran, Glengoyne, Glenturret and Bruichladdich). In particular, claims of authenticity and Scottishness of Scottish whiskies through commercial materials, case studies, website-forum discussions and 'independent' writing about such whisky are analysed. It is argued that the globalisation and commodification of whisky and whisky tourism, and the communicative backlash to these trends typified by the search for authenticity, is representative of a Habermasian struggle between two irreconcilable rationalities. This paper will demonstrate that the meaning and purpose of leisure can be understood through such explorations of the tension between the instrumentality of commodification and the freedom of individuals to locate their own leisure lives in the lifeworld that remains. © 2011 Taylor & Francis
Synergistic Use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 to Map Natural Forest and Acacia Plantation and Stand Ages in North-Central Vietnam
No full textMany remote sensing studies do not distinguish between natural and planted forests. We combine C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (Sentinel-1, S-1) and optical satellite imagery (Sentinel-2, S-2) and examine Random Forest (RF) classification of acacia plantations and natural forest in North-Central Vietnam. We demonstrate an ability to distinguish plantation from natural forest, with overall classification accuracies of 87% for S-1, and 92.5% and 92.3% for S-2 and for S-1 and S-2 combined respectively. We found that the ratio of the Short-Wave Infrared Band to the Red Band proved most effective in distinguishing acacia from natural forest. We used RF on S-2 imagery to classify acacia plantations into 6 age classes with an overall accuracy of 70%, with young plantation consistently separated from older. However, accuracy was lower at distinguishing between the older age classes. For both distinguishing plantation and natural forest, and determining plantation age, a combination of radar and optical imagery did nothing to improve classification accuracy
Determination of Structural Characteristics of Old-Growth Forest in Ukraine Using Spaceborne LiDAR
No full textA forest’s structure changes as it progresses through developmental stages from establishment to old-growth forest. Therefore, the vertical structure of old-growth forests will differ from that of younger, managed forests. Free, publicly available spaceborne Laser Range and Detection (LiDAR) data designed for the determination of forest structure has recently become available through NASA’s General Ecosystem and Development Investigation (GEDI). We use this data to investigate the structure of some of the largest remaining old-growth forests in Europe in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains. We downloaded 18489 cloud-free shots in the old-growth forest (OGF) and 20398 shots in adjacent non-OGF areas during leaf-on, snow-free conditions. We found significant differences between OGF and non-OGF over a wide range of structural metrics. OGF was significantly more open, with a more complex vertical structure and thicker ground-layer vegetation. We used Random Forest classification on a range of GEDI-derived metrics to classify OGF shapefiles with an accuracy of 73%. Our work demonstrates the use of spaceborne LiDAR for the identification of old-growth forests
Is Emo Metal? Gendered Boundaries and New Horizons in the Metal Community
No full textThis article examines debates in Kerrang! magazine around emo’s position in the metal community. The author asks: Why is emo vilified and rejected in British metal magazines, what can debates around emo reveal about the gendered nature of metal, and what potential for new envisionings of metal do they encapsulate? As the only British weekly magazine to focus on metal and hard rock, Kerrang! fulfils a pedagogical role in the metal community, establishing a canon of musical works, and a history and ideology of the genre. Fans are vividly represented in its letters pages, their words and images used to disseminate Kerrang!’s ideology of metal. The reported increase in female readership in 2006 has been attributed to the coverage of “emo” bands, such as My Chemical Romance, who have a majority of women fans. This coverage has provoked debate and censure in the magazine’s letters pages, debate that illuminates gender relations and allows new consideration of the gendering of the metal community. Inspired by Barthes’s Mythologies, the author performs a semiotic reading of Kerrang!’s June letters pages between 2000 and 2008 in order to understand the gendered myths forged and propagated by the design, images, content and editorial treatment portrayed. Employing Thornton’s concept of the gendered mainstream, the author delineates the implications of Kerrang!’s myths for female fans, arguing that the influx of female emo fans reading Kerrang! has caused a revolt amongst fans of more established metal bands, who represent the magazine and emo as feminised, akin to the mainstream. The author concludes that whilst debates around emo are rooted in the metal community’s conservative ideas about gender, the presence of many vocal young fans open to ideas of fluidity of gender allows us to conceive of a more inclusive metal community in which gender boundaries are less constrained
Sports Fans and Fan Culture: A Critical Reflection on Fandom as Communicative Leisure in a Commodified World
No full textThis critical reflection tries to understand sports fandom and sports fan culture by framing it in wider forms of fandom: music fandom and SF fandom. The reflection involves a review of key literature on sports fandom and wider fan cultures, but the main methodological focus is a critical reflection on the author's own fandoms. Specifically, the reflection returns to a PhD on rugby league and rugby union in the north of England, the first major ethnographic study undertaken by the author, before re-engaging with other forms of fandom in his personal life and his published research. New research is undertaken for this project in the form of personal reflections on fandom in the author’s own autobiography. The author argues that fandoms are important leisure spaces shaped by commodification, but which are still spaces where identity and community can be constructed by individual agency
How a turn to critical race theory can contribute to our understanding of 'race', racism and anti-racism in sport
No full textAs long as racism has been associated with sport there have been consistent, if not coordinated or coherent, struggles to confront its various forms. Critical race theory (CRT) is a framework established to challenge these racialized inequalities and racism in society and has some utility for anti-racism in sport. CRT's focus on social justice and transformation are two areas of convergence between critical race theorists and anti-racists. Of the many nuanced and pernicious forms of racism, one of the most obvious and commonly reported forms of racism in sport, racial abuse, has been described as a kind of dehumanizing process by Gardiner (2003), as those who are its target are simultaneously (re)constructed and objectified according to everyday myth and fantasy. However, this is one of the many forms of everyday racist experiences. Various forms of racism can be experienced in boardrooms, on television, in print, in the stands, on the sidelines and on the pitch. Many times racism is trivialized and put down as part of the game (Long et al., 2000), yet its impact is rarely the source of further exploration. This article will explore the conceptualization of 'race' and racism for a more effective anti-racism. Critical race theory will also be used to explore the ideas that underpin considerations of the severity of racist behaviour and the implications for anti-racism. © The Author(s) 2010
Large Reductions in Temperate Rainforest Biome Due to Unmitigated Climate Change
No full textAbstract Temperate rainforests are rare ecosystems globally; restricted to cool, moist conditions that are sensitive to a changing climate. Despite their crucial conservation importance, a global assessment of how temperate rainforests will be impacted by climate change is lacking. We calculated historical (1970–2000) climate conditions for the temperate rainforest biome using ERA5 reanalysis data for three key bioclimatic variables: warmest quarter temperature, annual precipitation and proportion of rainfall during warmest quarter. We used high‐spatial resolution climate projections for these variables to identify regions likely to become unsuitable for temperate rainforests under four future shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios. We predict unmitigated climate change (SSP 5–8.5) would lead to a 68.3 (95% confidence interval (95 CI): 53.4–81.3)% loss in the existing temperate rainforest biome by 2100 at a global scale with some national‐level reductions exceeding 90%. Restricting global warming to <2°C (consistent with SSP 1–2.6), limits loss of global temperate rainforest biome to 9.7 (95 CI: 7.8–13.3)% by 2100 and is crucial to ensuring temperate rainforest persistence. Deforestation has resulted in loss of up to 43% of the current temperate rainforest biome with only 37% of primary forest remaining, and some regions like Europe with virtually none. Protection and restoration of the temperate rainforest biome, along with emissions reductions, are vital to its climate future
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