Mark Falcous

The Decolonizing National Imaginary Promotional Media Constructions During the 2005 Lions Tour of Aotearoa New Zealand

This article explores the representational politics of postcolonial national identity in New Zealand/Aotearoa. Specifically, it interrogates the promotional media surrounding the 2005 British and Irish Lions rugby tour as a site in which narratives of nation were enacted. Symptomatic of the emergence of “corporate nationalisms” advertising emerged as a space in which a selective “national imaginary” was constructed. This sought to reconcile the challenges of the sociopolitical moment by positing a unified decolonized “kiwi” culture invoking several interlocking discourses. These included foregrounded representations of indigenous Māori culture as a central symbol of national essence. These representations simultaneously interlock those grounded in a longstanding discourse of Māori as primordial, spiritual, ignoble warrior. Furthermore, symptomatic of an ongoing “ethnogenesis,” active constructions of White settler—Pākehā—identities asserted a unique tie to Aotearoa/New Zealand and distinction from “the British.” Critically, these discourses operate to account for postcolonial challenges and shifts in reasserting a hegemonic national imaginary.

The media sports cultural complex: local/global disjuncture in New Zealand/Aotearoa.

This article explores the interdependence of interest groups operating within the media sports cultural complex in relation to the national sport of rugby union in New Zealand/Aotearoa. Specifically, we scrutinize the corporate “partnerships” between the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU), Adidas, and News Corporation in relation to issues and debates surrounding the globalization of New Zealands iconic rugby team, the All Blacks. The article draws on extensive interviews with the NZRUs marketing and sponsorship manager and Adidas New Zealands marketing manager. These interviews provide rare insights into how the strategies of these organizations, and their interrelated (but not interchangeable) commercial objectives, set limits and exert powerful pressures on aspects of the production and consumption of the national sporting mythology in New Zealand.

Imagining 'America': the NBA and local-global mediascapes.

This article concerns the role of mediated sport in local reconfigurations associated with globalization. The increasing worldwide transmission of sport raises questions regarding the cultural presence of ‘global’ sports. We combine elements of figurational sociology, cultural studies and critical political economy to examine the production and textual presence of the North American National Basketball Association (NBA) on United Kingdom television. Interviews with two media personnel were used to provide insights into the dynamics of production. Subsequent textual analysis revealed the dominant interpretive framework presented to viewers. This included the establishment of local–global hierarchy, education of local consumers, indigenous referencing, and caricatured representations of US culture. Observations regarding the nuanced complexity of the televisual udiscourse, and the scope for contradictory readings are made.

Press narratives of nation during the 2005 Lions tour of Aotearoa-New Zealand

In this essay we examine the ways in which the sporting press establish, define and reinforce the boundaries of national communities. We do so in the context of the flux surrounding nationalism in the white-settler dominated former colony of New Zealand/Aotearoa. We analyse New Zealand nationalism in press coverage of the 2005 British and Irish Lions rugby tour. We gathered 593 articles from a total of six national and regional newspapers throughout the tour and analysed them to tease out narratives of national belonging. We argue that the press selectively constructed the nation in hegemonic terms underpinned by several interlocking dimensions: the construction of male rugby as an embodiment of a fictive ‘national character’; the invocation of key protagonists – players and coaches – as embodying that character; idealized constructions of New Zealandness in conjunction with stigmatizations of ‘the British’; wilful nostalgia that lionizes rural – specifically Pākehā – settler masculinity; and, the construction of an ‘ethnic imaginary’ that assigns Māori a particular role and place within the national community. Our analysis focuses upon how this hegemonic national consciousness takes on a particular potency and nuance within the context of a sporting event which pitted the former colonial centre against the (post)colonizer dominated nation. It also illuminates the ambiguities of (post)colonial belonging by highlighting the unresolved tensions of press constructions of an apparently inclusive, specifically postcolonial, nationhood.

Contextualised skill acquisition research : a new framework to study the development of sport expertise

Background: Under the view of dynamical system theory, expertise in sports emerges from the interaction of multiple constraints. At an individual level, important interactions amongst constraints could include the relationships that evolve between ones family, playmates/coaches, and specific training activities. Or more broadly, other environmental constraints can be the strong socio-cultural-historical contexts that influence expertise development in sports around the world, such as rugby (e.g. New Zealand) and football (e.g. Brazil). An increasing number of studies have demonstrated the influence of environmental constraints on the development of sport expertise. Whilst making important contributions to knowledge, such studies have been limited in scope and fail to consider in depth how informal and even aversive learning environment constraints affect skills development. Objective: The objective of this paper is to outline a new contextualised approach to studying socio-cultural constraints on individuals, proposing an interpretive, multi-method approach to holistically investigate the interacting constraints on an athletes development pathway. Aims: We explain a rationale for adopting an interpretive research paradigm (in contrast to traditional positivist approaches) for exploring socio-cultural constraints. The epistemological and methodological assumptions of Bronfenbrenners Bioecological Model of Human Development are proposed as an underpinning framework for data collection and organisation of material. We advocate for ethnographic strategies of inquiry, followed by a discussion of potential methods for generating and analysing data: contextual analysis, participant-observation, and open-ended interviews. Finally, we discuss evaluation criteria for this contextualised approach viewed from a coherence theory of truth. Purpose: This position statement seeks to: (1) promote methodological possibilities to investigate the effect of socio cultural constraints on expertise acquisition in sport and (2) offer significant new theoretical and epistemological insights from the constraints-led approach to expertise and to integrate some of the interdisciplinary differences that exist in the body of sciences. Final thoughts: Our tentative contribution to the development of the proposed contextualised skill acquisition research framework is to build bridges across the methodological boundaries between sociology and motor learning in the first instance, rather than offering a unifying approach for the whole field. We hope that this position statement will provide a foundation for future related empirical papers and to stimulate other researchers to consider the framework for their own investigations of motor learning in the field.

Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa

The intent of this essay is twofold. First, to reflect on the emergence, development and sociohistorical positioning of rugby league in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is broached by locating the game within the contested presence of particular sporting codes as they relate to constructions of national identity. In doing so it explores the historical development and resonance of the game within the contested sociocultural terrain of New Zealand sport space. Second, I seek to establish a provisional agenda to explore the historical, social and cultural significance of the game which to date has been at the outer margins of both popular and scholarly sport historiography in New Zealand.

White is the new black? Football, media and the New Zealand imagination

This paper interrogates the media articulation of football/soccer to New Zealand national consciousness during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. 541 articles from national and regional newspapers and Internet news sites were gathered and analysed using a critically discursive approach. I argue that the press re-framed football within the national sporting imagination in the context of a narcissistic nationalism. Coverage was underpinned by several interlocking themes. First, falsely positing football as ethnically inclusive by emphasizing Māori players’ presence in the national team. Second, the entrenchment of archetypes and caricatures of both others and the national self. This included the evocation of a mythic New Zealand masculinity, with specific individuals lionized as key embodiments of the fictive national character. Third, the caricaturing of other nationalities is also used to bolster the national self – in particular the Italians and Australians. Such framings resonate with long-standing themes in the selective construction of a settler-informed New Zealand nationalism. Coverage, however, ignores the complexity of how individuals are flexibly and ambiguously articulated to the nation, particularly in the context of the global football labour market.

Grappling with judo: reflections on the complexities of embodied ethnography

Abstract Whilst ethnographies have long been used within critical sports studies research for their unrivalled windows into the lived experiences of social contexts, researchers have increasingly acknowledged their own active and performative role within them. Recent literature has emphasised the use of embodied ethnography to gain intimate and critically reflexive insights into how moving bodies are read, understood and engaged within research. In this sense the body of the researcher is itself a significant tool for critical examinations of power. This paper reflects on the ways in which, throughout ethnographic research at a New Zealand judo club the researcher was actively involved in shaping the research context, particularly through the physical and social reading of his body. It discusses how his appearance, movement, abilities/skills, competitiveness, social location, gender and ethnicity, both held value for entreé, yet simultaneously were read to confirm dominant assumptions about ‘Japan’, ‘Japaneseness’, and judo. In this way it explores how the ‘ethnographic research self’ both provided opportunities in the field and was also entangled with problematic assumptions and stereotypes.

Sporting mythscapes, neoliberal histories, and post-colonial amnesia in Aotearoa/New Zealand:

Andrews (1999) has argued that under conditions of market-based liberalization, the sporting past has increasingly been put to use for the purposes of accumulation. This selectively rendered “sporting historicism,” he argues, results in “a pseudo-authentic historical sensibility, as opposed to a genuinely historically grounded understanding of the past, or indeed the present by rendering history a vast, yet random, archive of events, styles, and icons” (2006). Under such conditions, power-laden and selective “mythscapes” emerge. In this paper, we carry Andrews’ contention forward by arguing that critical sport scholars should further problematize the uses of the sporting mythscape—particularly by calling into question those re-historicizations that emerge in public discourse and excavating whose interests they serve. Here we interrogate the politics of how sporting pasts are mobilized in contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand; in particular at the conjuncture of a globalized “free-market” economy and fluctuating (post-)colonial identity politics. We point to various cases that help reveal how specters of sporting pasts circulate within national mythologies in selective and politicized ways.

Fighting whose corner? Boxing, the sports press and the Australian imagination

This paper interrogates the sports press as a popular cultural site in which the representational politics of the (post)colonial nation are articulated. Drawing upon elements of critical approaches to ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ we are interested in how the cultural narratives that inform (post)colonial Australian nationhood are articulated and reproduced within the sports press in unique and contingent ways. We take impetus from Turners identification of media as ‘among the most important sites for interrogating the work of representing the nation, assessing its effects and interests, and revealing its ideological and political determinants’. Within the context of an historical moment characterized by the (re)assertion of ‘paranoid nationalism’, we centre on press coverage of the Anthony Mundine–Danny Green boxing match of May 2006. Coverage asserted oppositional evocations of national citizenry embodied by the two fighters. Specifically, the Anglo-Australian Green was constructed as embodying the idealised virtues of a white masculinity – the archetypal ‘aussie battler’. Aboriginal-Muslim Australian Mundine, meanwhile, was framed as the embodiment of an ‘un-integrated other’. Through bio-racial subtexts and suggestions of his devious opportunism, his longstanding political dissent was silenced and white Australia located as ‘victim’. Such framings point to the re-anchoring of a particular, valorised white-Anglo, masculine Australianess and, critically, provide a denouement to challenges to that authority.