Sporting Community: Media Culture, Sport, and Geography An Anthology Edited by Victoria E. Johnson and Jon Kraszewski The editors seek essays on the cultural geography of sport that blend the theoretical and political commitments of cultural studies with the textual and aesthetic attention of radio/film/TV/new media studies. The anthology will focus on U.S. sport and culture, but we encourage scholars who study U.S. sport in transnational contexts to submit their work. The editors define "media" and "sport" broadly and welcome essays on historical and contemporary sporting issues. We are particularly interested in work that theorizes specific modes of aural and visual address/aesthetics in sports media. How do these modes imagine and create "community," and how are they different from other narrative and textual practices as heard or seen on television, radio, film, video games, the Internet, or mobile technologies? We define cultural geography as an aesthetic and affective field through which community is constituted and contested symbolically, historically, and politically and by which individual and social identity is imagined and struggled over, especially in regard to the imagination of national, regional, and civic life at "home," in migration, and abroad. Sport is, in this sense, a network of intersecting affective attachments—an emotional guide to understanding "place" in the U.S., a field that can be constitutive of social subjectivity, a* *site* *of mobility within the mass consumer market, and a way of marking oneself in the world. Moreover, sport is not just a macro-political field of corporate profit; it is also a micro-political realm of everyday investments that have broader social and political relevance. The anthology will have three broadly defined sections that offer different yet overlapping lenses to view the relationships between sport, media, geography, and identity. These sections include "Community and Consensus Within U.S. Sport," "Community and Contention Within U.S. Sport," and "Extra-Regional U.S. Sport/U.S. Sport in Other Contexts." We have suggested possible topics for contributors but welcome essays on other issues not listed below. Interested authors should email a 300-500 word proposal and an abbreviated CV to Victoria E. Johnson ([log in to unmask]) *and* to Jon Kraszewski (* [log in to unmask])*. Proposals are due by March 15, 2007. We will respond to the proposals by May 1, 2007 and ask for 25-30 page drafts by August 1, 2007 . Please contact us if you have questions about potential essays or the anthology project in general. Editor Biographies: Victoria E. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Irvine has published essays examining the politics of place, race, and popular music in television and film* *in journals such as *Film Quarterly* and *The Velvet Light Trap* and in anthologies such as *The Television Studies Reader * and *The Revolution Wasn't Televised*. Her forthcoming *Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity* (NYU Press) examines the imagination of the U.S. "Heartland" in critical moments in prime-time television and U.S. social history.** Jon Kraszewski, Assistant Professor of Communication at Seton Hall University, has published in or has essays forthcoming in journals such as *The Quarterly Review of Film and Video*, *Journal of Film and Video*, and *The Velvet Light Trap *and anthologies such as *Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture*. His writings examine the intersections of identity politics and media industry studies. He is currently working on a book about television authorship as a cultural category. *Possible Topic Areas for Contributors to Consider:* * * *I. Community and "Consensus" Within U.S. Sport* - Sport as a utopian discursive field (e.g., sport as a way for people of different backgrounds to share histories [statistics, mythologies, etc.] of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, and/or regions; sport as a vehicle for "identification" with other races, ethnicities, classes, genders, sexes, and regions; sport as a shared screen through which broader cultural debates are exposed, interrogated, and read; sport as a way to recover from national traumas [9/11, Vietnam, World War II, etc.]) - Sport as a liberation discourse (e.g., the myth of the "level playing field"; the Negro Leagues; sport, civil rights, and integration battles; Title IX; Billie v. Bobby; US Women's Soccer Team/ phenomenon; The Masters boycott; teen stars and the "emancipation" of sport a la LeBron James, Michelle Wie, etc.) - Athleticism as a route to participation in the public sphere (e.g., performance of health and charity/volunteerism through athleticism; consuming identity/the idealized athletic self) - Sporting aesthetics/address and imagined communities (e.g., contemporary sports media coverage as "throwback" to "shared" address of the "networked nation"; specific modes of aural/visual address in sports coverage and/as routes to imagining access to the public sphere; participation and interactive community; nationalism and the marking of sports organizations—e.g., the Dallas Cowboys, Atlanta Braves, etc.—as "America's Team") *II. Community and Contention Within U.S. Sport* - Sport rivalries as questions of taste and capital on the local, regional, and extra-regional level (e.g., UNC v. Duke, Pittsburgh Steelers v. Cleveland Browns, Boston Red Sox v. New York Yankees, etc.; the question of free agency in the creation of new rivalries and reconfiguration of old tensions; sport as a central identifier of regional alliances in areas with more than one team competing in the same sport—e.g., Cubs fans v. Sox fans; Michigan v. Michigan State, etc.) - Sport as a site of mediated morality and crisis and as a way for people of different backgrounds to *contest* histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex and/or regional identity (e.g., Super Bowl/Janet Jackson; Malice at the Palace; NASCAR dads v. Soccer moms; NCAA mascots ban and appeals; NBA dress code; athlete feuds and troubles—Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens, Shaq and Kobe, etc.) - Sport as a site of historical value judgment (e.g., pitting different eras of a sport against each other, such as the steroid v. non-steroid era of baseball, the free agency v. non-free agency period in football, etc.) - The contrasting aesthetics/address of national and local broadcasts of sports; contention as critical discursive mode in radio and TV sports talk shows** *III**. "Extra-Regional" U.S. Sport/U.S. Sport in Other Contexts* - Sport and virtual communities (e.g., fantasy leagues as new media communities; online sports gambling; U.S. sports in niche media communities—"cable neighborhoods" such as Golf Channel, NFL Network, NBA Network, SPEED, etc.; Superstations WGN and WTBS and the marketing of the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves as national organizations) - Sport and the built-environment* *(e.g., new sport stadiums, downtown revitalization, and pre-civil rights-era nostalgia)** - Sport fan communities, mobility, and U.S. sports media (e.g., relocated teams such as the St. Louis Rams, Washington Nationals, Los Angeles Dodgers, etc. and their impact on local economies, fandom, and identity) - American sports and sports star paraphernalia abroad - Aesthetics, aurality and cross-platform branding (e.g., hip-hop soundtracks and styles in sport coverage and gaming; sport videogames and the aesthetics of identity and place; the X-Games as "made-for-TV" sport) ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]