This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover to Rio 2016 as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. The ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel and created a tornadóros: an ideal form of 'human' that manipulates audiovisual narratives of culture and identity for global audiences.
This book examines women's participation in the Olympic Games since they were allowed to be included in that global arena. Using a holistic, social scientific approach, and emphasizing the rhetoric of sport mediatization, Female Olympians reviews the literature relative to sexism, racism, and ageism before providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural perspectives such as the gendered language of Olympic reportage, religious considerations, women’s bodies relative to their training for the Games, drugs and doping, and female Paralympians. With numerous critical case studies, never-before assembled data, and personal interviews with athletes, this volume offers insights that both investigate and celebrate female Olympians’ successes.
Since the turn of the twenty first century, there has been a trend for urban "mega events" to be awarded to cities and nations in the East and Global South. Such events have been viewed as economic stimulant as well as opportunities to promote national identity, gain greater international recognition and exercise a form of 'soft power.' However, there has also been on-going controversy about the value, impact and legacy of global mega events in these cities and nations. This book provides a critical examination of the ambition for spectacle that has emerged across the East and Global South. The chapters explore the theoretical and conceptual issues associated with mega-events and new forms of globalization, from the critical political economy of mega-events in a changing world order to the contested social and economic legacies of mega-events and the widespread opposition that increasingly accompanies these events. The book also explores questions of urban development and governance, the role of new communications technologies in global economic expansion, the high security State, and the growing global influence of international non-governmental organizations. This book offers a rich collection of original theoretical contributions and global case studies from leading international scholars from the social sciences and humanities. It offers a fresh and unique interdisciplinary perspective that synthesizes cutting edge research on mega-events and urban spectacles while simultaneously contributing to a broader understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and international political power in the early twenty first century.
Global sports events are rarely far from the public eye. Such mega-events are about much more than the sporting competitions themselves. They entail global exposure and intense struggles by different stakeholders. This is the first book to examine sports mega-events from a mobilities perspective. It analyses the ‘mobile construction’ of global sports mega-events and the role this plays in managing labour, imaginaries, policies and legacies. In particular, the book focuses on the tension between the various mobilities and immobilities that are implied in the process of constructing a mega-event. It seeks to uncover the ways in which an event is a series of fluid interactions that occur sequentially and simultaneously at multiple scales in diverse spheres of interaction. Contributions explore the dynamics through which mega-events occur, revealing the textures and nuance of the complex systems that sustain them, and the ways that events ramify throughout the international system.
This concise, integrated introduction to the complex relationship between disability and the media offers a roadmap to the key areas of participation, access and representation. Bringing together international theoretical work and research on disability, with analysis and examples across a diverse range of media forms – from radio, to news, popular television and new digital technologies – this unique text explores the potential for establishing a more diverse, rich and just media. Providing an approachable but critical introduction to the field, Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin show how disability – like the closely connected areas of race and gender – is a pervasive issue in how the media represent society. Engaging and accessible, this is an invaluable resource for students of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Disability Studies, as well as teachers, researchers, media professionals, policy makers, and anyone interested in the intersections of disability and media.
Atmosphere, the elusive ambiance of a place, enables or hinders its mobility in global consumption contexts. Atmosphere connects to social imaginaries, utopian representational frames producing the culture of a city or country. But who resolves atmospheric contradictions in a place’s social and cultural rhythms, when the eyes of the world are turned on it? Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination examines ephemeral and solidified atmospheres in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and the handover ceremony to Tokyo for the 2020 Games. Indeed, highlighting the various social and cultural implications upon these Olympic Games hosts, Tzanelli argues that the ‘Olympic City’ is produced by aesthetic "imagineers", mobile groups of architects, artists and entrepreneurs, who aesthetically ‘engineer’ native cultures as utopias. Thus, it is explored as to how Rio and Tokyo’s "imagineers" problematize notions of creativity, cosmopolitan togetherness and belonging. Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination will appeal to postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and professionals interested in fields such as: Globalization Studies, Mobility Theory, Cultural Sociology, International Political Economy, Conference and Event Management, Tourism Studies and Migration Studies.
In today’s world, the need to eliminate natural and human-made disasters has been at the forefront of national and international socio-political agendas. The management of risks such as terrorism, labour strikes, protests and environmental degradation has become pivotal for countries that depend on their economy’s tourist sector. Indeed, there is fear that that ‘the end of tourism’ might be nigh due to inadequate institutional foresight. Yet, in designing relevant policies to tackle this, arts such as that of filmmaking have yet to receive due consideration. This book adopts an unorthodox approach to debates about ‘the end of tourism’. Through twenty-first century cinematic narratives of symbolically interconnected ‘risks’ it considers how art envisages the future of humanity’s well-being. These ‘risks’ include: migration as an infectious disease; alien incursions as racialized labour mobilities; cyborg rebellion as the fear of post-colonial otherness; and zombie anthropophagy as the replacement of rooted identities by nomadic lifestyles. Such filmic scenarios articulate the futuristic survival of community as the triumph of the technological human over otherness, and provide a means to debate societal risks that weave identity politics into unequal mobilities. This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in mobilities theory, tourism and travel theory, film studies and aesthetics, globalisation studies, race, labour and migration.
In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world’s political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside the increased media attention and publicity, came accusations of governmental ‘corruption’ and overspending. In Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events, Tzanelli uses Brazil’s 2014 World Cup to explore how mega-events articulate socio-cultural problems. Critically examining the aesthetics and ethics of mobilities in the mega-event, this book explores these socio-cultural issues and controversies: the background of staging mega-events, including the bidding process and the host’s expectations for returns; ceremonial staging and communications between artistic representations and national symbolism; the clear reaction mega-events almost always generate in national, regional and global activist circles, including accusations of overspending and human rights violations. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of mobility, sociology of globalisation, cultural sociology, social and anthropological theory, as well as the sociology of sport, human and cultural geography, and leisure and tourism studies.
From 1941 to 1945, a small number of Jews were given the rights of Aryan citizens in Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain why these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, how they were justified by the race theory of the time, and how the "Croats of the Mosaic faith" were eventually rejected as racial aliens.
When conflict, competing identities, and segregation collide; Identity, Segregation and Peace-building in Northern Ireland explores the implications for peace-building in Northern Ireland, and across the globe.
