Turning Passion Into Profit: When Leisure Becomes Work In Modern Roller Derby

Modern roller derby operates as a “by the skater, for the skater” business model, where participants are not paid but must devote a certain amount of time, effort, and money to sustaining their sport and respective organizations. At the same time, while derby is grounded in anti-corporate values, a growing industry has sprouted to support the sport, the larger share of which consists of small business retailers selling gear, apparel, and other accessories. I use the context of modern roller derby to examine the changing natures of work and leisure, specifically how they operate as greedy institutions and emphasizing the lack of boundaries between them. Simply put, what happens when a leisure activity intended to be done “for fun” becomes more like work? I answer the following research questions: How do roller derby participants make sense of their everyday experiences performing paid and unpaid labor for the sport? As derby is currently dominated by women (a rarity within other alternative sports subcultures), how are these experiences gendered? I draw on interviews conducted between 2016-2018 with 51 total participants across two sub-groups: 23 leaders of derby leagues and governing bodies, 23 derby-related entrepreneurs, and 5 who serve in both roles. I find that first, both leaders and entrepreneurs perform their derby labors out of passion for the sport. However, for entrepreneurs, working for derby (and therefore for passion) is precarious work that requires certain societal privileges in order to have this career option in the first place. Second, passion for derby and the ideal worker norm can lead to the expectation that derby participants give all of themselves to the sport, making derby a greedy institution in itself. Leaders experience fatigue, guilt, and obligation as they attempt to carve out non-derby boundaries for themselves. Finally, derby’s foundational values such as autonomy, anti-corporatism, do-it-yourself (DIY), and serving the collective may actually hinder the sport’s sustainability and growth. I conclude that derby and sport in general is a vantage point from which to examine overwork, the speedup of work, the dangers of passion work as exploitative, and the creep of work-like productivity and labor into leisure

there\u27s So Many Fabulous Butts In Derby : The Skating Body In Women\u27s Flat Track Roller Derby

Women\u27s flat track roller derby is a growing niche sport that has gathered much attention from media and academics alike. Previous research has analyzed the sport from a gendered view with limited focus on bodies in the broader sense. I attempt to fill this gap in the literature by asking: How do derby skaters define the derby body? In what ways do skaters resist and/or accommodate conventional bodily norms and those within derby? Utilizing an ethnographic repertoire of observation, interviews, and autoethnography, I examine the experiences of women derby skaters for a local flat track league located in the Midwest. Drawing from literature on gender and sport, resistance, and embodiment, I argue that skaters engage with a series of tensions and contradictions between societal norms and derby values, specifically those related to body size, athleticism, public versus private spaces, and the role of non-(born) women in the sport

Pacemakers, Fitbits, and the Fourth Amendment: Privacy Implications for Medical Implants and Wearable Technology

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Developing a draft learning progression framework for ESOL in New Zealand schools

Early in 2003 we were commissioned to produce a draft Learning Progression Framework (LPF) for ESOL in the New Zealand curriculum. The draft Framework was completed in June 2003 and entered the consultation round. In producing the draft Framework, we had to address a range of issues. Some these related to user expectations. Others concerned the relationship between the draft Framework and documents such as English in the New Zealand Curriculum, existing curriculum documents relating to other languages, and ESOL frameworks available in other countries. These issues proved to be critical. This paper explores some of these issues and introduces the draft Framework

Draft Auctions

We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium over sequential item auctions where predetermined items are auctioned at each time step. Specifically, we show that for any subadditive valuation the social welfare at equilibrium is an $O(\log^2(m))$-approximation to the optimal social welfare, where $m$ is the number of items. We also provide tighter approximation results for several subclasses. Our welfare guarantees hold for Bayes-Nash equilibria and for no-regret learning outcomes, via the smooth-mechanism framework. Of independent interest, our techniques show that in a combinatorial auction setting, efficiency guarantees of a mechanism via smoothness for a very restricted class of cardinality valuations, extend with a small degradation, to subadditive valuations, the largest complement-free class of valuations. Variants of draft auctions have been used in practice and have been experimentally shown to outperform other auctions. Our results provide a theoretical justification

Four Problems with the Draft Restatement’s Treatment of Treaty Self-Execution

The American Law Institute has embarked on the challenging task of restating the confounding distinction between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties. In some respects, the current draft of the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law represents an advance from the treatment of the subject in the Third Restatement (Third). At the same time, the current draft retains, and may even aggravate, some of the flaws of that earlier treatment. This Essay suggests four ways the current draft could be improved. First, the draft should explicitly recognize that the concept of self-execution is not a unitary one. The self-executing label encompasses four distinct types of reasons why a treaty might require implementing legislation. Second, the draft should abandon the claim that the self-executing or non-self-executing nature of a treaty is “essentially” about the treaty’s judicial enforceability. Third, the draft should qualify its claim that self-execution turns on the intent of the U.S. treaty makers. Finally, the draft should modify its claim that there is no presumption either in favor or against self-execution. There is substantial support in case law for a presumption in favor of self-execution with respect to one of the four categories of self-execution— the “intent-based” category

National Football League Skilled and Unskilled Positions Vary in Opportunity and Yield in Return to Play After an Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury.

BACKGROUND: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries pose a significant risk to the careers of players in the National Football League (NFL). The relationships between draft round and position on return to play (RTP) among NFL players are not well understood, and the ability to return to preinjury performance levels remains unknown for most positions. PURPOSE: To test for differences in RTP rates and changes in performance after an ACL injury by position and draft round. We hypothesized that skilled positions would return at a lower rate compared to unskilled positions. We further hypothesized that early draft-round status would relate to a greater rate of RTP and that skilled positions and a lower draft round would correlate with decreased performance for players who return to sport. STUDY DESIGN: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3. METHODS: Utilizing a previously established database of publicly available information regarding ACL tears among NFL players, athletes with ACL tears occurring between the 2010 and 2013 seasons were identified. Generalized linear models and Kaplan-Meier time-to-event models were used to test the study hypotheses. RESULTS: The overall RTP rate was 61.7%, with skilled players and unskilled players returning at rates of 64.1% and 60.4%, respectively (P = .74). Early draft-round players and unskilled late draft-round players had greater rates of RTP compared to skilled late draft-round players and both unskilled and skilled undrafted free agents (UDFAs). Skilled early draft-round players constituted the only cohort that played significantly fewer games after an injury. Unskilled UDFAs constituted the only cohort to show a significant increase in the number of games started and ratio of games started to games played, starting more games in which they played, after an injury. CONCLUSION: Early draft-round and unskilled players were more likely to return compared to their later draft-round and skilled peers. Skilled early draft-round players, who displayed relatively high rates of RTP, constituted the only cohort to show a decline in performance. Unskilled UDFAs, who exhibited relatively low rates of RTP, constituted the only cohort to show an increase in performance. The significant effect of draft round and position type on RTP may be caused by a combination of differences in talent levels and in opportunities given to returning to play