'It's just superstition I suppose ... I've always done something on game day': The construction of everyday life on a university basketball team

Research in sport has tended to focus on ‘spectacular’ or ‘extra-ordinary’ experiences, at the expense of discussing how particular phenomena are embedded in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic research with a university basketball team in the North of England, this article considers the meanings that amateur players attach to basketball and how such meanings go beyond their participation in competitive games. Analysis reveals the rhythms and rituals which are hugely important in determining the players’ sense of self. It also highlights the carnivalesque celebrations which allow the players to temporarily disrupt the status quo and experiment with alternative identities. In conclusion, it is argued that the meaning of sport should not be seen as rigid, determining and predictable, but rather a creative experience that is largely dependent on the subjective appropriation of time and place

Confronting Conspiracies in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Late Carvalho Novels

Contains fulltext : 156295.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)This essay examines the conspiratorial worldviews of three of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s novels on detective Pepe Carvalho. It claims that Vázquez Montalbán’s conspiracy narratives, due to their preoccupation with the (in)adequacy of names and actions within a conspiratorial totality, complicate both their own gesture of social criticism and the possibilities of rebellion by literary characters. Moreover, the article shows that conspiracies are located at the upper-end of the social spectrum in these novels. Unlike other contemporary writers of detective fiction in Spanish, then, Vázquez Montalbán stops short of imagining society as a productive battlefield between opposing complots.22 januari 201615 p

Disappearing bodies: The workplace and documentary film in an era of pure money

This article examines recent documentary films that have sought to narrate, record and criticise the effects on the French workplace of a shift to a new model of finance capitalism driven by ‘pure’ money. The films give representation to subjective experiences in the workplace showing how abstract economics is played out at the most intimate, personal and material level. The films seem to challenge dominant representations of finance capitalism as an order that has emancipated workers from the physical and disciplinary constraints of industrialism. The workers in these films describe the transition to a new economic order in terms of an intensification of corporeal pain. We see an economic order that pits an infinite accumulation of virtual money against the finite productive capacities of the human body