House of Netflix: Streaming media and digital lore

This article focuses on the emergence of a nascent streaming industry. The media industry studies conceptualization of “industry lore” can be read during times of transition for media industries. Streaming lore is a re-articulation of existing industry lore accompanying the advent of streaming technology and distribution. Contemporary streaming acts as a site of rupture, wherein industry discourses related to digital media are rendered visible. The article proposes three categories of emergent streaming lore and analyzes their relation to a growing streaming media industry. These categories include (a) Netflix as “quality” streams, (b) the algorithmic audience, and (c) cord-cutters and cord-nevers.     

Tinkering through transition: on ‘doctoring’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy

This article addresses the notion of ‘making it’ as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. In it, we draw on the tradition of material semiotics to reflect on our shared journeys from doctoral student to beginning scholar and beyond. By attuning ourselves to the relationality, materiality and precariousness of our experiences, we offer an answer to the question of what it takes to ‘make it’ as an early-career academic by advocating the practice of ‘making do’ or ‘doctoring.’ We develop this argument, first, by describing the narrative methods we used to conduct our inquiry and by explaining the material-semiotic ideas we used to explore the stories it generated. Then, we tell tales of our transitions from higher degree research student to early-career academic, focusing specifically on our ongoing, collective efforts to make do. In our discussion, we explore these narratives and attend to three features of our actions and activities as early-career academics; namely semiotic relationality, material heterogeneity and the precarious processes of heterogeneous engineering through which we sought to make a career in our field. We conclude by encouraging beginning scholars in physical education and sport pedagogy to become sensitive to these aspects of their own agency, and to experiment, experience and tinker together in ways that are attentive, inventive, caring and persistent.     

Recreational angling tournaments: participants' expenditures

Fishing tournaments are a common feature in recreational angling across a wide range of target species in both fresh and salt waters. Tournaments are organised for a number of purposes, including as commercial enterprises; as fund-raising initiatives for angling clubs; for economic development purposes (e.g. tourism); as well as improve participants' skill levels. Most tournaments are confined to geographically small areas and usually occur over a small number of days, which can mean a pulse of economically significant activity in the local area. This paper analyses the nature of expenditure associated with angling tournaments, including travel, food and accommodation, and angling-related expenditures as a function of socio-economic and angler characteristics. Analysis based on 106 tournaments across Ireland during 2013 finds a clear 80/20 segmentation between ‘high’- and ‘low’-spend anglers and that the segmentation occurs across all fish target species considered. The analysis also finds that British coarse anglers participating at Irish angling tournaments spend considerably more than other anglers irrespective of target species or angler country of origin.     

A Footnote to Sport History: Twenty Years of Cricket,Conflict and Contestation in Samoa, 1880–1900

Abstract

During the late-nineteenth century, imperial expansion increasingly produced what Louise Pratt terms ‘contact zones’ – ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’. Sport was one of the most visible spaces where this process took place. This paper uses the example of cricket in Samoa to demonstrate how different groups sought to control sport’s meaning amidst great uncertainty. Almost as soon as they began playing cricket, Samoans radically altered its method and meaning to create the distinctively Samoan game of kirikiti. This act established the cricket pitch as a ‘contested space’ between Samoans and foreigners, who were wary of kirikiti’s association with Samoan politics and customary exchange. As was the case in Samoa more generally, however, this struggle was not neatly divided between Samoans and foreigners. While missionaries and settlers portrayed the game as a threat, others – notably sailors and proponents of British influence – greeted it with relative enthusiasm. For their part, Samoans used the game to signal alignment with or against one or another Western power. Finally, Samoa’s growing ‘mixed-race’ community saw the game as a means of confirming their place in both the Samoan and European ‘worlds’.     

Book review

The following book is reviewed.Disability, politics and the struggle for change Len barton 'Ed.', 2001 London: David Fulton Publishers 184 pp., ISBN 1 85346 809 6 £21.00