Smash and Bash Cricket? Affective Technological Innovations in the Big Bash

Focusing on the Australian KFC T20 Big Bash League (BBL), this article explores the innovative televisual technologies that represent T20 cricket as an action packed 'smash and bash' spectacle. An array of innovative technologies is deployed to aesthetically and affectively re-present the BBL. Cameras and microphones are embedded within the field of play, operate in highly mobile and fluid ways, and are framed in close proximity to the action - particularly when placed on the players themselves. The BBL provides intersecting affective layers for viewer engagement built upon tools for analysis, sites of commodification, visual renditions of pseudo-player perspectives and an emphasis on fast-paced entertainment. By constructing degrees of sensory invigoration and vicarious involvement for both casual and invested viewers, these innovative technologies mobilise 'smash and bash' cricket as an affective televisual spectacle

London 2012 (Re)calling: Youth memories and Olympic ‘legacy’ ether in the hinterland

Engendering interest and support among young people was a key strategy for the organisers of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Part of the approach entailed promoting the event as a context and inspirational catalyst to propel young people's proclivities toward, and enduring participation in, sport and physical activity. Although a variety of participatory platforms were entertained, the discipline of physical education remained a favoured space in which enduring Olympic imperatives could be amalgamated with government policy objectives. In this paper data are presented taken from the initial three years of a longitudinal study on young people's engagement with the London 2012 Olympic Games, sport, physical activity and physical education within the UK's West Midlands region. Memory scholarship is brought together with Olympic critiques, legacy debates, youth work and discussions about physical education to conceptualise participants' anticipations and recollections of the London 2012 Olympic Games as a triptych of narrative fragments: each provides insights regarding youth experiences and the remnants of Olympic ether in the country's hinterland. The paper offers a means subsequently to think differently about how we might play with the qualitative sociological/historiographical moments (experiences, voices, accounts, stories, etc.) that we capture in and through our work

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders

Laclau and Mouffe's theory of radical democracy, and political identity in contemporary Europe

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN002993 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo