Ian McDonald

Theorising partnerships: governance, communicative action and sport policy

Under New Labour, partnerships have emerged to become a central mechanism of service delivery in social policy. In response to this development, a number of papers and texts have appeared that have questioned the claims made for the benefits of partnerships by politicians and policy makers. In particular, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusiveness and the practice of exclusion in partnership working has been highlighted. However, as pertinent as these insights are, it is argued here that extant research into partnerships in social policy remains theoretically undeveloped, characterised by one-sided approaches that either lack critical edge or are dismissive of the potential of partnership working. What is required is an approach that addresses the deeper contradictions of partnerships in social policy and the structuring relations of power underpinning the conceptions of partnerships. Drawing on key concepts in social and political theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the dynamic and contextual nature of partnership. In short, a differentiated theory of partnership is offered as a means of facilitating a more realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities of partnership working. A case study on partnerships in sport policy is used to illustrate the analysis.

Situating the Sport Documentary

Sport documentaries constitute a significant aspect of the documentary tradition. Yet they remain an underresearched area of critique in both documentary studies and sport studies. This article begins by exploring the reasons for the low status of the sport documentary before engaging in an analysis of range of recent and contemporary sport documentaries. The cinematic sport documentary is situated within the resurgence of the documentary form as the context for a critique of the contrasting political ethic and ideological underpinnings of Pumping Iron II: The Women , Hoop Dreams, and When We Were Kings, on one hand, and Dogtown and Z-Boys, Touching the Void, and Murderball on the other. Although the latter group of films have all enjoyed commercial success and have therefore succeeded as forms of entertainment, they reveal less about the relations of power circulating in their social and political environment than the former group of films.

Hindu Nationalism, Cultural Spaces, and Bodily Practices in India

With the opening of India to the global economy, technology, and culture, questions of national identity are being starkly posed and tested. An attendant rise in militant Hindu nationalism can be seen as a bold strategic response to this question as it attempts to place India among the most powerful nations in global modernity. Analyses of this attempt to fundamentally transform India have tended to be pitched at the institutional levels of economics and politics, yet the Hindu nationalist methodology is essentially a cultural project. This article will examine two forms of embodied cultural practices in India, each offering a contrasting set of cultural meanings and political possibilities and each highlighting the complexities and contradictions of the globalization-nationalism nexus in contemporary India.

Bodily practice, performance art, competitive sport : A critique of kalarippayattu, the martial art of Kerala

How are we to understand the meaning and politics of kalarippayattu in contemporary Kerala? This article begins by outlining the meaning of kalarippayattu in the mythohistorical landscape of feudal south India and its place in contributing to the development of cultural identity in the nascent state of Kerala. This provides a context for interpreting the different ways in which globalisation is reconfiguring kalarippayattu: a hitherto composite kalarippayattu is now being re-conceptualised as a bodily practice, a performing art and a competitive sport. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the work of Walter Benjamin, this article argues that while kalarippayattu as a competitive sport and performing art is ‘non-auratic’ by virtue of its assimilation into the capitalist logic of instrumental rationality and objectification, kalarippayattu as a bodily practice continues to have ‘aura’. Thus, the radical kernel of kalarippayattu as a martial art lies in its politico-phenomenological depth as a bodily practice, and in its capacity to act as a negative critique of dominant social trends.

Critiquing the Olympic documentary: Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad

Tokyo Olympiad is not only a cinematically accomplished documentary film, but also presents a highly insightful critique of Olympism and its limitations. In critiquing the production and politics of the film, I argue that Tokyo Olympiad ought to be seen as an expressive or ‘poetic’ documentary film in which Ichikawa, the humanist filmmaker, captures the complex and contradictory nature of humanism in the Olympic Games. By highlighting Ichikawas decidedly ambivalent perspective on the spirit of Olympism, I extend previous critiques that posit Tokyo Olympiad as the saviour of the true spirit of Olympism from its fascistic rendering in Riefenstahls Olympia. In so doing, my analysis points to the contrast between the sentimental and hackneyed treatments of sport often found in the media coverage of the Olympics, and the subtle profound examination of the banality and heroism of sport in Ichikawas Tokyo Olympiad.