Women, sport and new media technologies:Derby grrrls online

Sport has long been viewed as a public ‘good’ — a space for the creation and enactment of the ‘good, healthy citizen’. Yet this public ‘good’ has also been gendered masculine: competitive, public and ‘tough’, with women’s participation historically marginal to men’s. In Australia in recent years, the participation of women and girls has fluctuated, with decline or stagnation in more traditional organised sports (netball, basketball) and growth in other areas, such as roller derby and football. However, women’s sports are still largely invisible in the popular sport media. In this chapter we focus on roller derby as one particular women’s sport that has undergone a global revival, mobilised through ‘new’ youth-oriented media forms. We examine four diverse websites that form part of the ‘social web’ of derby: two official league sites, a blog and a Facebook group. The reinvention of roller derby is intimately connected to the alternative mediated spaces made possible by the social web. Roller derby players and organisers have used online spaces for various ends: to promote the sport community, to make visible the relations of power between those involved, to create and maintain boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the sport, and to express ‘creative’ aspects of identity. This chapter provides examples of the strategies and tactics used to establish and maintain roller derby as a ‘women’s only’ sport and some of the challenges and possibilities inherent in this highly mediated space.No Full Tex

The right to housing

The issue of justice in housing is rarely discussed in political philosophy. Yet, housing crises such as that currently faceSd by the UK highlight the importance of work in this area. In this article, I address the issue of housing justice by defending a basic right to housing. The right is in the first instance specific to a particular context, that of a Western liberal society. I defend a positive right to exercise a set of property rights called ‘lease rights’ over a self-contained living space of a certain standard, for a minimum term of 3 years. An important feature of this right is that it is a right to live alone. Where individuals have to live in communal housing because they lack the resources to do otherwise, their basic rights are violated. The account provides a distinctive understanding of how a government’s housing policy can fail its citizens

Homemade Tales of Homespun Lives: The Shared Search for Identity in Culinary Memoirs

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