Books by Damion Sturm
Sport in Aotearoa New Zealand: Contested Terrain
Routledge, 2022
This fascinating book investigates the sporting traditions, successes, systems, "terrains" and co... more This fascinating book investigates the sporting traditions, successes, systems, "terrains" and contemporary issues that underpin sport in New Zealand, also known by its Māori name of Aotearoa. The book unpacks some of the "cliches" around the place, prominence and impact of sport and recreation in Aotearoa New Zealand in order to better understand the country’s sporting history, cultures, institutions and systems, as well as the relationship between sport and different sections of society in the country. Exploring traditional sports such as rugby and cricket, indigenous Māori sport, outdoor recreation and contemporary lifestyle and adventure sports such as marching and parkour, the book examines the contested and conflicting societal, geographical and managerial issues facing contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand sport. Essential reading for anybody with a particular interest in sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book is also illuminating reading for anybody working in the sociology of sport, sport development, sport management, sport history or the wider history, politics and culture of Aotearoa New Zealand or the South Pacific.
Media, Masculinities, and the Machine: F1, Transformers, and Fantasizing Technology at its Limits
"Media, Masculinities, and the Machine identifies a distinctive phenomenon in today's media cultu... more "Media, Masculinities, and the Machine identifies a distinctive phenomenon in today's media culture – the contemporary male fantasy of 'suiting up' and pushing technology to its limits. The authors deconstruct this fantasy using two in-depth studies from American, British and global media: the social imagining of hi-tech in the long-running Transformers franchise and global Formula One motorsport, with links to numerous other areas of contemporary culture. By drawing on non-representational theory and the latest theories of affect while employing the method of autoethnography to explore what boys and men ‘want’ and say, the book offers a timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary cultural attachments. The book provides informative accounts of two instances united by their apparent gender focus and by their interest in ways of imagining high-tech. Tracking their theme through TV, cinema, toys, magazines, merchandising, and the culture of the gadget, the authors raise important questions about mediated masculinities today and propose a new theoretical framework for uncovering what is going on.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: The Android Imaginaire (Jacques, Move Your Body)
Chapter 2: Intensities and Affective Labor
Chapter 3: The Scene of Autoaffection
Chapter 4: Containment 1: the Strategy-Intensity Field
Chapter 5: Containment 2: the Companionship of Things
Chapter 6: Containment 3: Boys' Toys
Chapter 7: Masculinities, Vitality and the Machine
Afterwords
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
Fleming and Sturm have achieved a rare success in academic writing, by producing a book that is both important in its arguments and engaging in its style of writing and presentation. This book focuses on the complex relationship between humans, and more specifically men, and machines, but through their dual treatise of Transformers toys and Formula One racing, they provide insights that will have resonance with a wide variety of disciplines and subjects, including the study of masculinity, fandom, play, everyday life, material culture, technology, sport, social theory and media.
— Garry Crawford, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology, University of Salford
Like a Formula 1 driver negotiating a hairpin turn through the sheer downforce of acceleration, Fleming and Sturm stick fast to their objects of analysis and don’t let go. Linking affective resonances and processual materialities with hyper-reflexive riffings on methods, theories, fans and their attachments, this book continually assembles and then reassembles itself into new configurations of meaning and intensity. This is a book not only about machines but a machinic book!
-- Gregory J. Seigworth, co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader"
Papers by Damion Sturm
A ‘cannibalised’ cricket event? Mediatisation, innovation and The Hundred
Leisure Studies, 2023
Attending and consuming events are integral to many peoples’ leisure lives. However, as the liter... more Attending and consuming events are integral to many peoples’ leisure lives. However, as the literature attests, events represent significant sites of contestation over who does and does not belong. This paper explores such contestation in the notoriously elitist and traditionally exclusionary sport of cricket, and specifically The Hundred; the most recent attempt to democratise the sport by appealing to a more demographically diverse spectator base. It uniquely blends extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (n = 33), and a synthesised theoretical framework of mediatisation, media events and digital leisure studies, to argue that the apparent success of The Hundred in attracting and including new audiences has been enabled by incorporating elements of media spectacle. We therefore, use The Hundred to further delineate the processes described in the extant literature, and extend analysis of the ‘digital turn’, by drawing attention to the tensions between the speed and trajectory of these developments and the constraints imposed by cricket’s history. We illustrate how digital and analogue leisure remain highly interdependent, and argue that the ongoing contestation of game forms championed by different cricket stakeholders makes it improbable that The Hundred can achieve its twin goals of being economically viable, while increasing the popularity and, ultimately survival, of other cricket formats.
Sport in Society, 2021
Often international sport can be viewed through a nationalistic lens, with sport allowing for nat... more Often international sport can be viewed through a nationalistic lens, with sport allowing for nation-based team selections and competitions. Alternatively, we probe the notion of pseudo-nationalism in a New Zealand setting to examine two professional teams that, falsely, evoke familiar symbols and linkages to the nation. The first is ‘Team New Zealand’, which races in the global America’s Cup yachting series but overtly manufactures nationalistic links between the corporate sport, syndicate and nation. The second is the ‘New Zealand’ Warriors which operates as a professional franchise in the Australian-based National Rugby League competition against 15 other Australian clubs. Despite their corporate structures, as well as circulation in non-nation-based sporting contests, both teams exhibit forms of pseudo-nationalism by conflating, obfuscating and masquerading as nationally-representative sports teams. Collectively, both teams proffer a contested vision of pseudo-nationalism by mimicking other national sport teams while projecting, evoking and imploring an allegiance to ‘New Zealandness’.
Sport in Society, 2021
Shaped by the forces of globalisation, commericalisation and mediatisation, contemporary cricket ... more Shaped by the forces of globalisation, commericalisation and mediatisation, contemporary cricket has been repackaged as a media-centric “product” notable for innovative and experimental technologies. Indeed, by embracing constant technological innovation, cricket affords an accelerated culture of intensified spectacle interlaced with and interwoven by the threads of entertainment, consumerism, tourism and officiating orientations across its global telecasts. My article explores how technologies creatively manipulate and play with the spatial and aesthetic realms of cricket in non-traditional ways to recast, re-position, augment and enhance the viewing experience. Thus, cameras often oscillate between stylistic (intensified mobility), all-seeing (analytical omniscience) and participatory (pseudo-participatory) perspectives, providing a highly-mobile visual intensity through extraneous exploration, analytical complexity via hi-tech officiating tools, to the sensory invigoration of mediated athletic replication. Such permutations are extending to the digitalised, mobile and virtual formats that continue to re-shape the future mediated consumption of cricket for ephemeral and invested viewers.
Convergence, 2020
Media technologies and digital practices are reshaping and redefining the future of sport fandom.... more Media technologies and digital practices are reshaping and redefining the future of sport fandom. This article points to some of the utopian and dystopic transformations for fandom presented by (post)television, digital/social media and the anticipated virtual technologies of the future. Specifically, three distinct phases of fan participation are charted around existing and futuristic visions of technology-as-sport. First are the current televisual technologies that attempt to engage and retain traditionally “passive” viewers as spectators through pseudo-participatory perspectives that will carry over to new screens and technologies. Second, the assumed interactive participation afforded by social and digital media is considered, positing the future amplification of connectivity, personalisation and networking across digital fan communities, albeit undercut by further impositions of corporatisation and datafication through illusory forms of “interactivity”. Finally, the fusion, intensification and continual evolution of technology-as-sport is explored, asserting that forms of immersive participation will be significant for future virtual technologies and may ultimately re-position fans as e-participants in their own media-tech sport spectacles. Collectively, it is anticipated that the creation of new virtual worlds, spaces and experiences will amplify and operationalise forms of immersive participation around augmented spectatorship, virtual athletic replication and potentially constitute the sport itself. Indeed, a new model of the fan-as-immersed-e-participant is advanced as such futuristic virtual sporting realms may not only integrate fans into the spectacle but also project them into the event as participant and as the spectacle.
Celebrity Studies, 2019
New visual regimes of fame and femininity continue to challenge the traditional realms of sport s... more New visual regimes of fame and femininity continue to challenge the traditional realms of sport stardom and media representation. Through new media, individual athletes potentially have more agential control over their imagery, content and forms of self-presentation. This article offers an exploratory case study of French-Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard’s self-presentational on Facebook. Through her construction of an online Genie persona, Bouchard offers an idealised, desirable and commodified ‘body’ of work on Facebook. Collectively, Genie’s playful embodied projections and performances merge athletic endeavours and self-depreciating tennis posts with an array of provocative, hetero-sexy displays. Poignantly, such self-presentations are notable for the frequency of bikini-clad and ‘Genie hot body’ imagery, coupled with the reduced emphasis on tennis performances. As such, Bouchard’s visual regime seemingly illuminates, confronts and challenges traditional sporting and feminine identity constructions. By enacting and performing the online Genie persona, Bouchard largely eschews the expected sport stardom parameters of merit and achievement, while foregrounding a postfeminist body politics around desirability and agency through her self-sexualising and self-objectifying practices.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2019
Recently, several researchers have highlighted the difficulty with the binary terms “insider–outs... more Recently, several researchers have highlighted the difficulty with the binary terms “insider–outsider” within qualitative research. We similarly critique the insider/outsider binary in this article, but offer an alternative by utilizing Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of capital, habitus, and field to compare two researcher’s ethnographic accounts of researching sports facilities in New Zealand. One of the ethnographers, D.S., describes himself as closer to an outsider than an insider in the context of the velodrome he was examining, while R.K. describes herself as an insider in the field of gymnastics. Through comparing their accounts, we show how the language of insider/outsider can be limiting. Instead, we argue that Bourdieu’s framework provides a more nuanced account of researcher positionality that moves beyond the insider/outsider binary, while affording insights into the reflexive and fluid researcher performances that shape the ethnographically researched field.
Leisure Sciences, 2019
Creating inclusiveness and user-friendly spaces is a challenge to any new sporting venue. This ar... more Creating inclusiveness and user-friendly spaces is a challenge to any new sporting venue. This article explores the attempts by various ‘stakeholders’ involved in the production of the Avantidrome, New Zealand's ‘Home of Cycling’ to align the rhetorics with the realities for creating a new velodrome across its first 20 months of operation. More specifically, there exists a tension in the ‘selling’ of a sport-for-all model with the public construction of a high-performance, elite-use facility. In neoliberal times, such contradictions seemingly proliferate when public spending blends and blurs with corporate sponsorship and a results-driven framework for funding elite sport while being aligned with visions of community. Combining user interviews and sustained on-site ethnographic observations with Foucault's theories of power, we seek to understand how these multiple entities produced relational forms of power that resulted in efforts to accommodate both community-based and high performance models within the same cycling space.
‘Fluid Spectator-Tourists’: Innovative Televisual Technologies, Global Audiences and the 2015 Cricket World Cup
By continuously integrating the latest new-media advances while still predominantly relying on ol... more By continuously integrating the latest new-media advances while still predominantly relying on older broadcast models, contemporary mediated sport affords an interesting paradox. That is, while most well-known sports provide “digitized” processes, platforms and applications, these technologies primarily complement the televised coverage. Thus, despite assumptions of a decline in broadcast media, the televisual representation of sport often remains paramount in terms of viewership, circulation (or its online replication) and broadcasting rights. This is especially true for “mega” sporting events that generate widespread interest and often attract large, diverse audiences to their live global telecasts outside of normal viewing hours.
My article considers these contemporary trends through a specific examination of the 2015 Cricket World Cup (CWC) and its global televised representations. As a televised sport, cricket continually integrates emerging technologies and tools to aesthetically revamp its re-presentation to attract and retain large international audiences. Cricket’s specific televised technological innovations and refinements blur the lines of information, entertainment and commodification, while allowing a traditional broadcast-media form to be re-presented in non-traditional ways. That is, cameras and other technologies often operate in fluid and highly mobile ways by floating above, encroaching upon, mapping over, or being embedded within the field of play. In combination, such technological perspectives provide an intensified visual navigation of the cricket-scape and position viewers as fluid spectator-tourists. Cameras and, by implication, viewers are increasingly allowed to enter the field of play and navigate nimbly among the spaces and competitors of live sport. Furthermore, there is a stylistic orientation towards extraneous exploration, as the agile cameras (e.g. Steadicams, Segways, Spidercams and drones) fluidly roam and float across the cricket-scape and its surrounds, often dipping into and out of the on-field action.
In what is presented as a global “mega-event”, these contrasting technologies and multiple perspectives provide affective layers for broader viewer engagement, aesthetically rendering the CWC as a televised sports “spectacular” for both casual and engaged viewers of live TV broadcasts.
Focusing on the Australian KFC T20 Big Bash League (BBL), this article explores the innovative te... more Focusing on the Australian KFC T20 Big Bash League (BBL), this article explores the innovative televisual technologies that represent T20 cricket as an action packed ‘smash and bash’ spectacle. An array of innovative technologies is deployed to aesthetically and affectively re-present the BBL. Cameras and microphones are embedded within the field of play, operate in highly mobile and fluid ways, and are framed in close proximity to the action – particularly when placed on the players themselves. The BBL provides intersecting affective layers for viewer engagement built upon tools for analysis, sites of commodification, visual renditions of pseudo-player perspectives and an emphasis on fast-paced entertainment. By constructing degrees of sensory invigoration and vicarious involvement for both casual and invested viewers, these innovative technologies mobilise ‘smash and bash’ cricket as an affective televisual spectacle.
My article plays with notions of performativity and representation to repudiate assumptions of on... more My article plays with notions of performativity and representation to repudiate assumptions of one-dimensional fandom. In particular, due to its self-reflexive writing style, I argue that autoethnography can articulate and show the subject-fan voice through evocations of first-person, insider experiences. Therefore, staged vignettes are deployed to represent the fan as an assemblage of investments, intensities, and energies that anchor within but fluidly move through broader socio-cultural realities. Illuminating the materialization and salience of affect, these stagings intentionally convey varying levels of invigoration to refute common misperceptions of fandom as singular in its focus, experience, or intensity. Moreover, underpinning these renditions is a degree of playfulness, crafting autoethnography to explore both the subject and fandom as an enacted series of performances. Ultimately, as a performative writing and representational strategy, the vignettes aim to blend, blur, and elicit traces of a culturally bound and multifaceted first-person fandom.
What is it that fans do? Do they consume? Do they produce? And when they are in the process of be... more What is it that fans do? Do they consume? Do they produce? And when they are in the process of being fans how do we characterize that activity? Is it passive and determined? Is it active and resistant? And are these the only categories we have to work with when discussing fan activity? This discussion is a step towards exploring what new terms and theories can be used to elucidate contemporary fan practices, specifically sport fan practices, beyond these more traditional binaries. Particularly, this discussion is an attempt to grapple with what the current state of capitalism makes possible or impossible for sports fans.
""(Introduction):
From the moment at the International Rugby Board (IRB) meeting in Dublin in ... more ""(Introduction):
From the moment at the International Rugby Board (IRB) meeting in Dublin in November 2005, when it was announced that New Zealand would be the host nation for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, it was clear this event was not just about a series of games, semi-finals and a winner. It was to be a grand event for New Zealand, which was as much about financial returns, visitor numbers and showcasing New Zealand to the rest of the world—and hopefully getting exposure beyond the usual rugby-watching nations, which can be described as ‘international’ but not necessarily ‘global’. Our article explores the representations of ‘New Zealandness’ that were evoked by holding this host nation status. However, rather than the rugby itself, it is the mediated moments, nationalistic communal rituals, ancillary events and the (trans)national promotional cultures of corporate sponsors that coalesced around New Zealand and forms of nation-building that are our prime focus. ""
Writing from an autoethnographic perspective, this article explores male leisure practices via th... more Writing from an autoethnographic perspective, this article explores male leisure practices via the mediated relationships fans enter into with stars. More specifically, my own fandom for Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve is the locus of study, revealing how this affective investment shapes and furnishes my corresponding leisure practices. Notions of gendered ‘performativity’ come to the fore, with my own displays evoking, enacting and revealing oscillating performances of masculinity. Moreover, there are interesting gendered dynamics that such fan leisure practices flag in terms of the intersection of female/male relationships and the potential ‘fantasy’ and/or narcissistic readings that a male fan identifying with and performing as another male sport star afford. Finally, my research reveals paradoxes for contemporary masculinities, with fans reliant upon mediation and commodification to facilitate and sustain their performative roles.
Motorvehicle sports: Formula One racing
With global appeal, large commercial and mediated interest and splashes of glamour, motor-racing ... more With global appeal, large commercial and mediated interest and splashes of glamour, motor-racing operates on the knife-edge of risk versus reward for its competitors. With the origins of motor-racing dating back to the 1890s, the elite contemporary structure of Formula One is a volatile mix of hi- technology, breakneck speeds and risk-taking bravado as drivers race their expensive hybrid rocket cars around the globe.
Book Chapters by Damion Sturm
Processes of Greenwashing, Virtue Signalling, and Sportwashing in Contemporary Formula One
The Future of Motorsports Business, Politics and Society, 2023
Operating as one of the most expensive, media-centric, and global sports, Formula One is ripe for... more Operating as one of the most expensive, media-centric, and global sports, Formula One is ripe for analysis due to an array of contemporary issues. Specifically, despite wide-ranging sustainability initiatives, Formula One provides self-promotional ‘green-washing' strategies that maintain a large carbon footprint and cause environmental destruction. Moreover, Formula One can be accused of virtue signalling by proposing to challenge diversity and inclusion in a sport that has steadfastly remained white, elitist, and male. Finally, the precarious nature of human rights within some of the emerging host nations further exposes the potential hypocrisy of Formula One's virtue signalling, while leading to accusations of sportwashing by authoritarian regimes. It is these processes of greenwashing, virtue signalling, and sportwashing that will be probed in this chapter.
Sport in Aotearoa New Zealand: Contested Terrain (Editors: Damion Sturm & Roslyn Kerr), 2022
Contemporary celebrity provides media objects ripe for circulation, consumption and representatio... more Contemporary celebrity provides media objects ripe for circulation, consumption and representation. Select New Zealand athletes are celebrated and lionised for their sporting feats, while allegedly embodying nationalistic attributes surrounding their character, value and “mana” as representatives of and ambassadors for the nation. Of course, such inscriptions are always fluid and in flux, with stardom re-evaluated and re-inscribed based on sporting and mediated performances. Moreover, underpinning New Zealand sport stardom are the conditions for celebrity that are subject to local/global fluidity, with many athletes needing to achieve recognisable success in international sport competitions to shape and solidify their national sport stardom. We probe three case studies to illuminate these dimensions. As an agential embodiment of liquid celebrity, Sonny Bill Williams operates as a polysemic signifier of sporting masculinities, while being embroiled in an array of commercial, racial, erotic, nationalistic and religious discourses. Interrelated, Brendon McCullum’s refashioned charismatic projection as New Zealand cricket captain bore witness to nationalistic outpourings of affection and hero worship. Finally, Lydia Ko embodies contemporary liquid sport celebrity through global golf successes, while negotiating nationalistic identity politics that blur her Korean/New Zealand background, an “Exotic Othering”, and attempts to endear herself to the nation.
Sport in Aotearoa New Zealand: Contested Terrain (Editors: Damion Sturm & Roslyn Kerr), 2022
This chapter examines the emergence and transformation of the New Zealand All Blacks, one of the ... more This chapter examines the emergence and transformation of the New Zealand All Blacks, one of the most successful sporting franchises in history, following the professionalisation of global rugby. Tracing the impact of both a global broadcast deal and subsequent attraction of global corporate sponsors, the All Blacks are examined as both a national team and a national brand. In particular, the chapter focuses on the concept of corporate nationalism, “the process by which corporations (both local and global) use the currency of ‘the nation’ – its symbols, images, stereotypes, collective identities and memories as part of their overall branding strategy” – to explore the contested terrain of the team, the sport of rugby and its associated cultural rituals, for example, the haka. A series of advertisements are explored that illustrate the shifting place of rugby in New Zealand and the ongoing challenge for the All Blacks to be a national team which is dependent on being both a local and a global brand.
Sport, Gender and Mega-Events, 2021
Formula One offers an interesting terrain to explore the gendered tensions that play out in a meg... more Formula One offers an interesting terrain to explore the gendered tensions that play out in a mega event/motorsport space. Indeed, despite some recent progressive transformations, Formula One’s long-standing intertwining of ‘glamour’ and hi-tech racing has arguably reflected and projected a set of ‘traditional’ gendered dynamics seemingly more aligned with stereotypical 1960s James Bond filmic gender representations, rather than a contemporary mega sporting event.
Formula One focuses on, emphasises and embellishes masculine attributes, with these ‘macho racers’ understood and reified through their bravado, technical mastery and risk-taking endeavours. Nevertheless, the ‘real’ presence of risk, bravado or mastery is debatable in contemporary times, with Formula One the safest it has ever been. Originating in 1950, Formula One’s too frequent driver fatalities ushered in a raft of safety features since the mid-1960s that have been incrementally updated over time. Thus, while the spectre of death may loom due to wheel-to-wheel racing at speeds in excess of 200mph, the reality is a safe and largely sanitised sport, with only four fatalities occurring since 1982.
Similarly, elements of driver skill, mastery and risk-taking have also been reduced. Due to the current regulations and restrictions, drivers often conserve their cars, tyres, engines and fuel-usage rather than ‘race’ one another during a Grand Prix. As such, five-time world champion Lewis Hamilton has bemoaned the lack of effort, risk or fear for drivers and asserts that contemporary Formula One has become ‘too easy’. Further encroaching into Formula One’s space is the appeal of Esports and sim-racing which, through its rapid progression, development and commercialisation, is offering an alternative ‘virtual’ motorsport avenue replete with championships and ratification by official organisations. Hence, the once sacred space for displays of masculine bravado, mastery and risk-taking is being negated in contemporary Formula One.
Meanwhile, marginalisation, trivialisation and sexualisation persists for women. Traditionally Formula One (and most other categories), relied upon ‘grid girls’ to allegedly add ‘glamour’ to motorsport through their appearance and ornamental roles as sexy props/trophies for the ‘masculine’ drivers. In 2018, Formula One removed ‘grid girls’, proclaiming it to be an allegedly outdated practice, while reducing the overt emphasis on sexualised female ‘eye-candy’ roles. However, while arguably a positive progressive step, the lack of female driving opportunities remains a barrier. Only five female drivers have ever raced in Formula One, the last in 1992, while test driver roles have limited and curtailed, rather than offered pathways, to securing a drive in Formula One. Hence, test drivers such as Susie Wolff and Simona de Silvestro left Formula One disillusioned by the lack of future opportunities, while Carmen Jorda had a seemingly ornamental ‘development driver’ role with Lotus F1 and Renault geared towards a media emphasis on her appearance rather than driving ability. In an interrelated development, Formula W was created in 2019 as a female-only series to enhance female driving prospects, but has been met with a polarised reception to date. It is these gendered dynamics, tensions and representations surrounding Formula One that will be the focus of this chapter.
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Books by Damion Sturm
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: The Android Imaginaire (Jacques, Move Your Body)
Chapter 2: Intensities and Affective Labor
Chapter 3: The Scene of Autoaffection
Chapter 4: Containment 1: the Strategy-Intensity Field
Chapter 5: Containment 2: the Companionship of Things
Chapter 6: Containment 3: Boys' Toys
Chapter 7: Masculinities, Vitality and the Machine
Afterwords
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
Fleming and Sturm have achieved a rare success in academic writing, by producing a book that is both important in its arguments and engaging in its style of writing and presentation. This book focuses on the complex relationship between humans, and more specifically men, and machines, but through their dual treatise of Transformers toys and Formula One racing, they provide insights that will have resonance with a wide variety of disciplines and subjects, including the study of masculinity, fandom, play, everyday life, material culture, technology, sport, social theory and media.
— Garry Crawford, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology, University of Salford
Like a Formula 1 driver negotiating a hairpin turn through the sheer downforce of acceleration, Fleming and Sturm stick fast to their objects of analysis and don’t let go. Linking affective resonances and processual materialities with hyper-reflexive riffings on methods, theories, fans and their attachments, this book continually assembles and then reassembles itself into new configurations of meaning and intensity. This is a book not only about machines but a machinic book!
-- Gregory J. Seigworth, co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader"
Papers by Damion Sturm
My article considers these contemporary trends through a specific examination of the 2015 Cricket World Cup (CWC) and its global televised representations. As a televised sport, cricket continually integrates emerging technologies and tools to aesthetically revamp its re-presentation to attract and retain large international audiences. Cricket’s specific televised technological innovations and refinements blur the lines of information, entertainment and commodification, while allowing a traditional broadcast-media form to be re-presented in non-traditional ways. That is, cameras and other technologies often operate in fluid and highly mobile ways by floating above, encroaching upon, mapping over, or being embedded within the field of play. In combination, such technological perspectives provide an intensified visual navigation of the cricket-scape and position viewers as fluid spectator-tourists. Cameras and, by implication, viewers are increasingly allowed to enter the field of play and navigate nimbly among the spaces and competitors of live sport. Furthermore, there is a stylistic orientation towards extraneous exploration, as the agile cameras (e.g. Steadicams, Segways, Spidercams and drones) fluidly roam and float across the cricket-scape and its surrounds, often dipping into and out of the on-field action.
In what is presented as a global “mega-event”, these contrasting technologies and multiple perspectives provide affective layers for broader viewer engagement, aesthetically rendering the CWC as a televised sports “spectacular” for both casual and engaged viewers of live TV broadcasts.
From the moment at the International Rugby Board (IRB) meeting in Dublin in November 2005, when it was announced that New Zealand would be the host nation for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, it was clear this event was not just about a series of games, semi-finals and a winner. It was to be a grand event for New Zealand, which was as much about financial returns, visitor numbers and showcasing New Zealand to the rest of the world—and hopefully getting exposure beyond the usual rugby-watching nations, which can be described as ‘international’ but not necessarily ‘global’. Our article explores the representations of ‘New Zealandness’ that were evoked by holding this host nation status. However, rather than the rugby itself, it is the mediated moments, nationalistic communal rituals, ancillary events and the (trans)national promotional cultures of corporate sponsors that coalesced around New Zealand and forms of nation-building that are our prime focus. ""
Book Chapters by Damion Sturm
Formula One focuses on, emphasises and embellishes masculine attributes, with these ‘macho racers’ understood and reified through their bravado, technical mastery and risk-taking endeavours. Nevertheless, the ‘real’ presence of risk, bravado or mastery is debatable in contemporary times, with Formula One the safest it has ever been. Originating in 1950, Formula One’s too frequent driver fatalities ushered in a raft of safety features since the mid-1960s that have been incrementally updated over time. Thus, while the spectre of death may loom due to wheel-to-wheel racing at speeds in excess of 200mph, the reality is a safe and largely sanitised sport, with only four fatalities occurring since 1982.
Similarly, elements of driver skill, mastery and risk-taking have also been reduced. Due to the current regulations and restrictions, drivers often conserve their cars, tyres, engines and fuel-usage rather than ‘race’ one another during a Grand Prix. As such, five-time world champion Lewis Hamilton has bemoaned the lack of effort, risk or fear for drivers and asserts that contemporary Formula One has become ‘too easy’. Further encroaching into Formula One’s space is the appeal of Esports and sim-racing which, through its rapid progression, development and commercialisation, is offering an alternative ‘virtual’ motorsport avenue replete with championships and ratification by official organisations. Hence, the once sacred space for displays of masculine bravado, mastery and risk-taking is being negated in contemporary Formula One.
Meanwhile, marginalisation, trivialisation and sexualisation persists for women. Traditionally Formula One (and most other categories), relied upon ‘grid girls’ to allegedly add ‘glamour’ to motorsport through their appearance and ornamental roles as sexy props/trophies for the ‘masculine’ drivers. In 2018, Formula One removed ‘grid girls’, proclaiming it to be an allegedly outdated practice, while reducing the overt emphasis on sexualised female ‘eye-candy’ roles. However, while arguably a positive progressive step, the lack of female driving opportunities remains a barrier. Only five female drivers have ever raced in Formula One, the last in 1992, while test driver roles have limited and curtailed, rather than offered pathways, to securing a drive in Formula One. Hence, test drivers such as Susie Wolff and Simona de Silvestro left Formula One disillusioned by the lack of future opportunities, while Carmen Jorda had a seemingly ornamental ‘development driver’ role with Lotus F1 and Renault geared towards a media emphasis on her appearance rather than driving ability. In an interrelated development, Formula W was created in 2019 as a female-only series to enhance female driving prospects, but has been met with a polarised reception to date. It is these gendered dynamics, tensions and representations surrounding Formula One that will be the focus of this chapter.