97,782 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
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
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
When Mr Fox met Kit Calvert, the maker of Wensleydale Cheese: Constructing Yorkshireness in the sixties Leeds folk scene
No full textDreaming 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
Joshua Davis: Author of Spare Parts
No full textCitation: K-State First (2016). Joshua Davis: Author of Spare Parts [Flier]. Manhattan, Kansas: K-State First.Flyer advertising Joshua Davis's author talk at Kansas State University
Hegemony in postmodernity: Lifeworld colonization and the instrumentalization of leisure
No full textThis paper synthesizes Gramscian and Habermasian perspectives on new conditions of life and hegemonic struggle that the postmodern initiated in the closing decades of the 20th Century (Jameson, 1984). Drawing from Habermas, it discusses the decline of the public sphere and the colonization of lifeworlds in advanced capitalism, and, focusing on leisure as a bundle of practices (Spracklen, 2009, 2015), explores the implications of these developments for the organization of bourgeois hegemony and the prospects for transformative alternatives
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