Branding the Games: Commercialism and the Olympic City

This chapter examines the role of branding and sponsorship in the Olympic games - with particular reference to the urban. The chapter identifies tensions between Olympic values, branding activities and a projected legacy. The chapter offers a social-theoretical account of the Olympic brand to analyisis on :London2012. It is a contributiuon to wider analysis in a book drawing upon historical, cultural, economic and socio-demographic perspectives. Olympic Cities examines the role of London hosting the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as a means to promote urban regeneration and social renewal in East London

’Alright on the night?' Envisioning a ’night time economy’ in the Thames Gateway,

Providing a comprehensive overview and critique of the Thames Gateway plan, this volume examines the impact of urban planning and demographic change on East London's material and social environment

Book Review: Michael Payne - Olympic turnaround

In this book review, Iain McRury looks at an account of the "wake-up call" aimed at the International Olympic Committee in the late 20th century to prevent it from becoming ’extinct’, and its subsequent revival as the Olympics became a brand in itself. This is a re-issue of a book first published in 2005, updated with added material from the Beijing Games and some prefatory comments on London. MacRury judges it as timely and a welcome re-issue of a seminal account of the latest phases in Olympic and sports marketin

The Apprentice: Realities and Fictions for the London Skyline

This chapter examines the representation, values and legitimation in ’the city’, paying particular attention to London and reviewing a popular reality TV show: The Apprentice. The chapter frames the show as a morality tale akin to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1973). Closer analysis highlights the show’s engagements with rhetorics of legitimation and ethos in ’the city’ and applying frames outlined in Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). The chapter adds to wider interdisciplinary analyis of London and recession, in the context of a book that examines the impact of the recession and discusses London’s future trajectory as an entrepreneurial city and capital of the United Kingdom

Book Review: New Dimensions of Doctor Who: Adventures in Space, Time and Television. London: I B Tauris. Hills, M. (ed) (2013)

Review of recent edited collection. Doctor Who, New Dimensions and the Inner World: A Reciprocal Review Two significant additions to Doctor Who’s academic ‘canon’ were published recently and, continuing Media Education Journal's interest in new ways of approaching the review format, here we ask two authors, Iain MacRury and Matt Hills, to appraise each others’ texts

Branded content: rupture, rapture and reflections.

This is primarily a discussion about change, a topic relevant to many industries and, particularly, to students as they prepare for exciting but potentially uncertain futures. It is an occasion to think about the implications and emergence of some new promotional idioms such as branded content, sub genres such as ‘native advertising’, and to consider some new generation, high profile, promotional media forms, notably vlogging

Framing the Mobile Phone: The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object

This article proposes that the affective processes that shape our relationship to the world of digital consumption and communication can be illuminated further when viewed through a lens of object relations psychoanalysis. We focus on the use of the mobile phone as both an object in the world and of the psyche in order to reflect upon its uses as an evocative object that shapes the psychosocial boundaries of experience in everyday life. We argue that in contrast to the concepts of interpersonal communication that can be found in some domains of popular culture and in communication studies, object relations psychoanalysis can be usefully deployed in order to explore the unconscious attachments that develop in relation to consumer objects, allowing for the complexity of feeling and reflection that may emerge in relation to them and the potential spaces of the mind. The mobile phone’s routine uses and characteristics are widely understood. At the same time, the mobile phone invites critical reflections that identify a paradoxical object of both creative and pathological use. Such reflexivity includes the mobile’s relationship to the complexity of psychosocial experience within the contemporary cultural moment. Applying the ideas of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Christopher Bollas, we argue that one explanation for why the mobile phone continues to attract not only enthusiastic cultural commentary but also a degree of apprehension across academic and popular-discursive settings can be found in its capacity to both disrupt and connect as an object of attachment and as a means of unconscious escap

Re-thinking the Legacy 2012: The Olympics as commodity and gift

This paper opens discussion about the nature of Olympic ‘legacy’ and articulates a contradiction in the way ‘legacy’ is conceived - between ’gift’ and ’commodity’ (Mauss 1954).The The paper argues that establishing working definitions and parameters for ‘legacy’ is a difficult task. Defining ‘legacy’ is problematic especially if conceived as an entirely predictable or measurable set of objectives. Indeed, the definition of ‘legacy’ is partly constitutive of the legacy itself, a component of achievements that the city might make. Such a ‘legacy definition’ will become a functional term in the complex planning and evolving conceptions underpinning urban change for some time—if successfully negotiated and if governable. As such, ‘legacy’, and the activities and values entailed to it, can come to provide a catalytic ‘vocabulary of motives’ and a legitimating discourse enabling politicians, communities and their individual representatives to justify investments, evolving strategies and activities connected to and connecting developmental gains in a more or less healthy fashion. It is because of this that legacy and its various meanings come to matter

Humour as 'social dreaming': Stand-up comedy as therapeutic performance

Stand-up comedy binds dramatic cultural spectacle to ritualised, intimate exposure. Examining ‘case’ examples from live comic performance, this paper describes stand-up as a kind of social dreaming. The article proposes a theoretical frame drawing on Thomas Ogden's notion of ‘talking as dreaming’ and psychoanalytic accounts connecting humour and melancholia. Locating the stand-up comedian's propensity for humour in a specialist capacity to hone, display and process traumata, the paper characterises stand-up as a performative oscillation evoking paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties. A psychosocial gloss places stand-up as a cultural resource in the service of the popular-as-therapeutic. The paper articulates complementarities between Henri Bergson's formulations on the function of laughter and an emergent object relations account in order to help to recognise ‘containing’ and ‘cultural-restorative’ aspects of much stand-up, understood as contemporary psychosocial ritual