124,998 research outputs found
Breaking the mould? Whiteness, masculinity, Welshness, working-classness and rugby league in Wales
No full textTraditionally, rugby in Wales has meant rugby union, the once-amateur, fifteen-a-side code that has a long history of working-class, male involvement in the Valleys of South Wales (Williams, G., 1985). In recent years, however, rugby union has been joined in South Wales by the non-traditionally Welsh sport of rugby league. Once upon a time, rugby league was the sport that “bought” Welsh rugby players who went north (Collins, 2006). Rugby league has now expanded into Wales, developing its version of the rugby code. After a series of (historical) false starts, Welsh rugby league emerged in the 1990s as a sustainable participation sport. Two professional rugby league clubs have been established in Wales (Crusaders in Wrexham and the South Wales Scorpions), and a number of amateur rugby league clubs are now playing in the summer-based Rugby League Conference.
But why would anyone in Wales watch, and actively support, rugby league? What does it say about contemporary leisure choices, social identity and nationalism? In this paper, we explore the ways in which rugby league has penetrated the rugby union heartlands of Wales, and how the individuals who support Welsh rugby league (the players, the fans, the administrators) see their own Welshness in relation to their support of the ‘other’ rugby. We have interviewed Welsh rugby league enthusiasts at two periods in Welsh rugby league’s recent history: the high point of the Crusaders move to North Wales in the Super League, and the low point of the club’s resignation from the elite league and its resurrection in the lowest division of professional rugby league. For many rugby league fans the desire on the part of Welsh people to develop rugby league in Wales – supported by the Rugby Football League, the national governing body of rugby league in England, which works closely with the Wales Rugby League – is dismissed as an expensive nonsense by northern English fans on on-line forums and in the letters pages of rugby league newspapers. Yet those letters pages also show evidence of Welsh pride in their rugby league clubs, and Welsh pride in being part of rugby league’s ‘imaginary community’ (Spracklen, Timmins and Long, 2010):
I read with incredulity the letter by Phil Taylor in last week’s League Express. Mister Taylor stated that ‘the most important criterion for a Super league licence should be the proximity of the M62’ [to the club]… Perhaps Mister Taylor should venture a little further from his ‘shoe box in the middle of the M62’. I live in rural Carmarthenshire… A few friends and I decided to follow the Celtic Crusaders, which involved a 100 mile round trip for home matches down another motorway, the M4.”
(Nic Day, letter to League Express, 2765, 27 June 2011, p. 35)
The following section is a literature review on Welshness, community, masculinity and rugby union. After that, we briefly discuss our methods and then introduce some important history and policy context around rugby league in the north of England and Wales. The rest of the chapter is built around the issues raised by our respondents and our critical analysis and discussion. We will show that the adoption of rugby league is associated with two separate trends: an awareness of and identification with its northern, working-class roots, its anti-London rhetoric and its ideology of toughness and resistance; and a rationalisation that league is just another form of rugby, in which traditional Welsh maleness can be protected. Both of these trends allow the whiteness of Welsh rugby union and of Welshness itself (like the whiteness of northern English rugby league and traditional northern identity – see Spracklen, Long and Timmins, 2010) to go un-noticed and unchallenged
Negotiations of minority ethnic rugby league players in the Cathar country of France
No full textThis article is based on new empirical, qualitative research with minority ethnic rugby league players in the southwest of France. Drawing on similar research on rugby league in the north and the south of England, the article examines how rugby league, traditionally viewed as a white, working-class male game (Collins, 2006; Denham, 2004; Spracklen, 1995, 2001) has had to re-imagine its symbolic boundaries as they are constituted globally and locally to accommodate the needs of players from minority ethnic backgrounds. In particular, the article examines the sense in which experiences of minority ethnic rugby league players in France compare with those of their counterparts in England (Spracklen, 2001, 2007), how rugby league is used in France to construct identity, and in what sense the norms associated with the imaginary community of rugby league are replicated or challenged by the involvement of minority ethnic rugby league players in France. Questions about what it means to be (provincial, national) French (Kumar, 2006) are posed, questions that relate to the role of sport in the construction of Frenchness, and in particular the role of rugby league (and union). © Copyright ISSA and SAGE Publications
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
Ethnographies of the imagined, the imaginary and the critically real: Blackness, whiteness, the north of England and rugby league
No full textRugby league is part of the white, working-class (male) culture of the north of England, and is a sport that is used by its supporters to (re)produce both an imagined community of nostalgic northernness and an imaginary community of locally situated hegemonically masculine belonging. The invented traditions of its origins link the game to a white, working-class twentieth-century culture of mills, pits, terraced houses and pubs; a culture increasingly marginalised, reshaped and challenged in this century. In this paper we use two medium-term, ethnographic research projects on rugby league (one from Spracklen; the other an on-going project by Timmins) to explore northernness, blackness, whiteness and our own roles in the ethnographies as 'black' and 'white' researchers researching 'race' and identity in a community that remains (but not exclusively) a place for a working-class whiteness to be articulated. We argue that our own histories and identities are pivotal in how we are accepted as legitimate ethnographers and insiders, but those histories and identities also posea critically real challenge to us and to those in the community of rugby league with whom we interact. © 2010 Taylor & Francis
Playing the Ball: Constructing Community and Masculine Identity in Rugby
No full textThis thesis explores and examines the construction of a sense of community and masculine identity in the sport of rugby league. I pose the question of how the game constructs these identities, then the thesis proceeds to synthesise a working theoretical framework which draws upon ideas of the cultural production of class, community, history and gender to provide a focus for the research. I develop the way rugby league becomes an imaginary community, 'the game', and how this sense of community defines the ideas of masculinity and northem-ness, and creates both belonging and exclusion. My theoretical framework develops new ideas about how community is created, and how hegemonic masculinity is produced and maintained in sport. The thesis is situated in a particular research paradigm, the naturalist paradigm, which best serves the aim of exploring the field and developing theory through a grounded theoretical approach. This informs both the synthesis and development of theory around the concept of exploring the field, and suggests a particular methodology. This thesis is based on qualitative research I undertook in a field consisting of a number of rugby league clubs in a district I called Sudthorpe. In addition, I did fieldwork at a rugby union club and a women's rugby league club so that the theoretical concepts I developed could be expanded and explored further. This qualitative fieldwork was flexible enough to allow me to explore the social networks that extended outside Sudthorpe, and I used both ethnography and setni-structured interviews. In addition, I reviewed en-L literature, secondary sources, and consulted archives and experts. Coupled with a literature review, reflexivity and grounded theory, my research was triangulated by a multimethod approach that allowed for a synthesis of ideas. This synthesis of symbolic community and masculine identity in rugby provide the original ideas of the thesis
The Strange and Spooky Battle over Bats and Black Dresses: The Commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend and the Loss of a Subculture
No full textFrom counterculture to subculture to the ubiquity of every black-clad wannabe vampire hanging around the centre of Western cities, Goth has transcended a musical style to become a part of everyday leisure and popular culture. The music’s cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. In this article, we examine the phenomenon of the Whitby Goth Weekend, a modern Goth music festival, which has contributed to (and has been altered by) the heritage-tourism marketing of Whitby as the holiday resort of Dracula (the place where Bram Stoker imagined the Vampire Count arriving one dark and stormy night). We examine marketing literature and websites that sell Whitby as a spooky town, and suggest that this strategy has driven the success of the Goth festival. We explore the development of the festival and the politics of its ownership, and its increasing visibility as a mainstream tourist destination for those who want to dress up for the weekend. By interviewing Goths from the north of England, we suggest that the mainstreaming of the festival has led to it becoming less attractive to those more established, older Goths who see the subculture’s authenticity as being rooted in the post-punk era, and who believe that Goth subculture should be something one lives full-time
Female, Mosher, Transgressor: A 'Moshography' of Transgressive Practices within the Leeds Extreme Metal Scene
No full textThis paper examines and reconceptualises transgression in the Leeds extreme metal music subculture through theories of performance, embodiment and spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord (1967), is a social relation that is alienating and mediated by images, visuals, and technology. At a live extreme metal concert fans subvert social norms, challenge gendered expectations, and disregard norms of etiquette and decency. Moshing is the most visible and sensuous example of transgression within the extreme metal scene. It is an aggressive, physically demanding performance which embodies resistance to the impersonal and disillusioning world of the spectacle (Halnon, 2004). The pit is a transgressive space that is itself transgressed by women who participate in this masculine, chaotic space, disrupting the homosocial bonds of male solidarity (Gruzelier, 2007). This paper offers an ethnographic account of a female metal fan participating in the transgressive practice of moshing within the Leeds metal music scene- a moshography
Pagans and Satan and Goths, Oh My: Dark Leisure as Communicative Agency and Communal Identity on the Fringes of the Modern Goth Scene
No full textGoth music's cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. Through a dark leisure framework, the present article examines the way in which parts of the Goth scene embraced paganism and, latterly, Satanism, as actual practices and ontologies of belief. Ethnographic research and case studies on paganism and Satanism in Goth subcultures are used. This paper argues that being a pagan or Satanist in the fringes of the Goth scene is a way of using dark leisure to resist, usefully and meaningfully, the fashionable but instrumental globalised choice of mainstream popular culture
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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
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