Tag: Conferences: Cultural studies

This conference seeks to bring together a wide range of scholars, both early career and more experienced, from a range of disciplines, whose research focuses on the visual and material culture of sport. By aligning research with specific international and global festivals, ranging from Olympic and Paralympic Games and World tournaments, to inter-continental competitions such as Asian and African Games, or events such as the Commonwealth Games, we hope to demonstrate the breadth of cultural practice and the vital role played by artists and creators in shaping the appearance and environment of such events.

There has to date been little considered and comparative analysis of the many ways in which sporting stories are told across different cultures and the many purposes they serve. ‘Telling the Story of Sport’ aims to redress this by creating a forum in which individual scholars are invited to contextualise their research and begin to develop a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of sporting narrative practices.

At the centre of both sport and cultural performance are bodies. In the spectacles of professional or amateur sport, plays, musicals, dance, and opera, bodies are made to transcend their fleshly existence by the mise-en-scène and the audience contract. The (sport) spectacle transforms the embodied subject of the athlete/actor into a representation of human potential and possibility.

The notion of ‘endangered bodies’, or bodies in danger, arises from our concern with current Western political and socio-economic tendencies and practices against the discriminated or disenfranchised Other, whose body is physically, materially and symbolically subjected to internal pressures towards normalization and homogenization.

We are seeking contributions to a workshop that will examine the political life of the canoe in all of its diverse forms. While much critical scholarship on the canoe has offered a critique of its hegemonic position, we also hope to highlight how the canoe has been used to resist and redraw relationships of power.

In order to consider the interaction of the local and global (e.g., economic, political and cultural), as well as possible paradoxes and tensions in the formation of small nation celebrity, we welcome submissions that probe celebrity in any small nations located in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania.

The symposium will explore the ways in which Muhammad Ali appears in un/expected spaces, beyond conventional readings. We are seeking to explore such questions as: What is Ali’s twenty-first century significance? How do we interpret the global meanings of Ali? Is sport central or peripheral to understanding Ali?

This one-day symposium will open up debates and explore the nuances of sex and sexualities within popular culture and will afford a platform for postgraduate students (MA/MSc onwards) and creative practitioners exploring these areas to meet peers, share work and learn from each other.