The mainstreaming of disability cricket in England and Wales: Integration ‘One Game’ at a time

Disability sport in Great Britain has, since its genesis over sixty years ago, gained greater public profile with each passing decade. Arguably, this is a result of a more direct, interventionist approach from the British government and the Sport Councils into the field of disability sport over the past twenty years. In this paper we highlight a case of integration within sport by examining the process of mainstreaming disability cricket within England and Wales. Following a review of the extant literature in this area we will draw upon Bourdieu's practice theory in order to examine the impact of the implementation of policy on the management of issues of disability in mainstream cricket. Longitudinal ethnographic data (including participant observation and semi-structured interviews) was collected on the organizations involved in this mainstreaming process. Informants were either involved in the delivery of disability cricket or in the management of disability sports partnerships. Preliminary findings suggest that true integration is still unrealized. Whether the policy seeks true integration or whether mainstreaming is simply another modernizing process seeking greater efficiencies from sport organizations is unclear. Nevertheless a number of institutional pressures from the proximal and distal external environments have provided support for generating mainstreaming initiatives at management levels. In addition to these findings we argue that an additional outcome of this research is to demonstrate the suitability of a relational approach for conceptualizing policy, its interpretation by sport managers and the implementation strategies that follow.     

For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Association's ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.     

‘A conception of the beautiful’: C. L. R. James' Glasgow Herald cricket articles, 1937–1938

This article examines the series of cricket reports that C. L. R. James wrote during the seasons of 1937 and 1938 for The Glasgow Herald newspaper. It demonstrates the degree to which James' later ideas concerning the sport are already discernible in these writings. The article provides a contextual account of these reports, seeking to relate them both to their historical moment and to James' later theories of cricketing aesthetics, and of the sport's social and political significance.     

‘Superbowling’: Using the Super Bowl’s Yearly Commentary to Explore the Evolution of a Sporting Spectacle in the American Consciousness

Abstract

In the days following Super Bowl III, New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte coined the phrase ‘superbowling’. Consisting of the ‘chatter’ and diverse perspectives voiced throughout the nation in the days surrounding each Super Bowl, superbowling includes the off-the-wall psychiatric evaluations and epic gloating by football fans, political reactions and sociological analyses concerning the game’s affect on the nation’s institutions, as well as the hasty generalizations by alarmed moralists and university professors. This paper utilizes the ‘superbowling’ penned between Super Bowls I and XXXVI as evidence that provides insight into ‘the variety of ways in which Americans understood and enacted their political culture at a specific time’. By investigating the varieties of superbowling topics highlighted within each yearly Super Bowl, one cannot only better understand the evolution of Super Bowl Sunday, but can also understand its relationship to the prominent historical happenings and personalities of the time. It is concluded that by the turn of the millennium, superbowling revealed at least three enduring qualities of Super Bowl Sunday: ‘conspicuous consumption’, ‘shared experience’, and ‘national holiday’.     

‘Supporters,not consumers.’ Grassroots supporters’ culture and sports entertainment in the US

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research with supporters’ groups in the US, this article explores how Ultra and other global models of fandom are being appropriated by soccer fans in the US and Canada. I argue that these fans enact more than stylistic expressions of fandom but instead contest the boundaries of locally accepted models fandom. Most notably, organized soccer supporters in the US reject the notion of being simply consumers of sports entertainment and see themselves instead as stakeholders in the teams they follow and as de facto constituents that the clubs need to be accountable to. At the same time, the global and local organizational structures and histories of professional soccer confront these fans with specific restrictions in how they are able to articulate their interest as fans.     

‘We Will Try Again,Again, Again to Make It Bigger’: Japan,American Football,and the Super Bowl in the Past,Present, and Future

Abstract

This study is to analyse how the Japanese have traditionally received and currently perceive the Super Bowl, and for this purpose, it aims to locate the position of American football in Japanese history, society, and culture. It explores the game’s history and then examine the degree of its spread among Japan’s sporting population. A two-dimensional approach of historical study and inter-game comparison gives context to the analyses of reference frequency and contents of news media, followed by speculative discussions of what the near future of Japan’s American football would be like. To conclude, it clarifies the ways the Super Bowl has been received and is now being perceived by two groups: The first group is the general people who see the Super Bowl as the convenient and useful medium by which they could learn effectively about American culture through the one-night mania for ‘conspicuous consumption’. The second group comprises American football experts and enthusiasts, including 13,000 athletes and their OBs, coaches, trainers, and other staff members of the leagues and associations as well as the general sports fans. For this group, the Super Bowl is the apex of their favourite sport to which only a selected talented few could join.     

‘Strong mothers make strong children’: sports,eugenics and nationalism in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century

Based on post-structural feminist and gender studies, the present article analyses the importance given to the practice of physical education, sports and exercise as part of the national policy to strengthen the Caucasian-Brazilian population at the beginning of the twentieth century, emphasising the priority made of the White female body as the most important instrument in strengthening the so called ‘White race’. All the editions of the Revista Educação Physica, the first magazine published specifically for physical education and sport in Brazil, was the primary research source. Other books, manuals, reviews from scientific congresses and official publications from the Brazilian Government at the time were also examined. Via the technical analysis of the contents of the aforementioned publications, it was possible to conclude that the Brazilian nationalist discourse at the time sought what was called the ‘refinement of the White race’ by strengthening its women while, at the same time, systematically ignoring Black women.     

Sex,sport and justice: reframing the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in European and UK sport policy

Universalist claims are often made about sport which is, as a consequence, increasingly written into national and international policy as an entitlement of citizenship or even human right. Further, in most countries physical education (PE) is a compulsory component of children's education, and sport is seen as central to this. Consequently, in the interests of justice sport must aspire to be egalitarian, that is, relevant to and meaningful for boys and men, and girls and women. In this context three fundamental questions are asked in relation to sport: (1) Do all citizens want to participate? (2) Who counts as a citizen? and (3) What are justice and equality? Feminist political and citizenship theory particularly the work of Pateman, Lister and Fraser is used to explore these questions and interrogate the ‘who’ of citizenship and the ‘what’ of justice in relation to framing sport policy in Europe and the UK. It is argued that notwithstanding the extensive use of the Council of Europe definition of sport,¹1. ‘“Sport” means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels' (CE, 1992 CE. (1992/2001). European sports charter. Retrieved from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?Ref=Rec(92)13&;Sector=secCM&;Language=lanEnglish&;Ver=rev&;BackColorInternet=9999CC&;BackColorIntranet=FFBB55&;BackColorLogged=FFAC75 [Google Scholar]–2001 CE. (1992/2001). European sports charter. Retrieved from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?Ref=Rec(92)13&;Sector=secCM&;Language=lanEnglish&;Ver=rev&;BackColorInternet=9999CC&;BackColorIntranet=FFBB55&;BackColorLogged=FFAC75 [Google Scholar]). and despite or even because of the widespread adoption of the language of gender equality and gender mainstreaming, although formal sport citizenship rights might be accorded to all individuals and regarded as gender neutral, this masks a discourse of androcentric sport citizenship. This has captured European and UK sport policy and provision and is hindering further progress towards gender justice in sport and therefore PE. Given the universal and compulsory aspirations of sport particularly within PE, gender justice should be conceptualised not only as cultural recognition, political representation and economic redistribution within the normalised frame of competitive performance sport or ‘sport for sports sake’; but also as a critical meta-political remapping and reframing of sport as sport and physical recreation or ‘sport for all’.     

Football at the ‘End of the Line’: Economic Decline,Cross-Subsidies and Football League Membership in the NW Steel District of England

Sporting leagues are generally based on collectivist principles, as the members need one another to produce their product. For much of its existence, the Football League has functioned as a cartel, operating income-sharing arrangements and controlling its membership. In the period from 1959 to 1986, a limited number of clubs left the League through the re-election process, in modest recognition of geographical logic, as clubs from growth areas to the south typically replaced clubs from more traditional economic areas that were often over-represented in the Football League. Clubs are widely seen to be utility-maximisers seeking success. Success in a sporting league is defined in a precise and relativist way and this article focuses on two of the least successful clubs to have played in the Football League, Barrow AFC and Workington FC, whose failure to obtain repeated re-election in the 1970s removed the only Football League clubs in a distinct economic zone, the north-west coastal steel district. This article examines the re-election mechanism and the particular economic factors that affected these two clubs, ranging from the decline of their main local industry to changes in the levels of and responsibilities attaching to rising cross-subsidy payments in the Football League.     

From ‘cultivators of the soil’ to ‘citizen-soldiers’: physically active education and the nation at Maryland Agricultural College

In 1866, military drill and instruction became part of the curriculum of Maryland Agricultural College as a result of the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, a law setting the terms for the establishment of agricultural colleges across the USA. The introduction of military instruction meant a direct inclusion of physically active coursework that preceded the widespread emergence of organized physical education courses in American educational institutions. However, this was not the first time physical activity was used and discussed at the college: previously, the uses of physical activity at the college wholly entailed outdoor agricultural practice in which students applied pedagogical training about agricultural techniques in the field. In this paper, we examine early Maryland Agricultural College printed discourse from 1859 to 1886, studying how the college shifted focus from idealizing the Republican male citizen as a physically active farmer or ‘cultivator of the soil’ in the years preceding the American Civil War to a physically active ‘citizen-soldier’ in response to the social and political effects of the conflict. Our analysis sheds light on the historical place of such physical activity coursework within the larger historical narrative of American physical education's emergence, and also provides useful historical context for critically viewing linkages between physical culture, nationalism, agricultural education and the military in contemporary physical education.     

Going ‘to the Fountainhead’: Black American Athletes as Cultural Ambassadors in Africa, 1970–1971

During the Cold War, the State Department frequently employed prominent black athletes as cultural ambassadors in an attempt to defuse global criticism of racism in the USA. In the late 1960s, as many black American athletes identified increasingly with the “Black Power” movement, their personal motivations often clashed with State Department goals. In 1970, the black American tennis star Arthur Ashe, along with Stan Smith, conducted an extremely successful tour of six African nations. The following year, the State Department attempted to replicate that success by sending NBA stars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson to Africa. Those players, for a variety of reasons, were less cooperative and effective than Ashe. The shortcomings of the Jabbar/Robertson tour contributed to a decline in the State Department's practice of utilising star black athletes as cultural diplomats.