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)

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