Smithsonian Institution Archivesi

This article explores the socially constructed space of Wikipedia and how the process and structure of Wikipedia enable it to act both as a vehicle for communication between sport fans and to subtly augment existing public narratives about sport. As users create article narratives, they educate fellow fans in relevant social and sport meanings. This study analyzes two aspects of Wikipedia for sports fans, application of statistical information and connecting athletes with other sports figures and organizations, through a discourse analysis of article content and the discussion pages of ten sample athletes. These pages of retired celebrity athletes provide a means for exploring the multidirectional production processes used by the sport fan community to celebrate recorded events of sporting history in clearly delineated and verifiable ways, thus maintaining the sport fans’ community social values.

From 1880 to 1923, Irish nationalists created and sustained an independent cultural identity shaped by external and internal forces.  British political cartoons reveal key external cultural perceptions of the Irish, while Irish nationalist writings endorse internal concepts of character and project political aims.  Irish nationalists present an uninterrupted internal identity in pursuit of autonomy.  Images published in Punch, or the London Charivari, provide external factors of identity that evolve from exaggerated threat to trivial concern while the nationalist political demands they represent escalate.

Identity is the product of complex interaction and compromise between external and internal definitions.  Individuals and groups self-identify through processes of internal definition.  Internal definitions emerge through an internal voice yet with the expectation of an audience.  Irish nationalist leaders projected their internal identity in their writings, speeches, and activities.  External definition assigns factors of identity to another group of people; it cannot be a solitary act because it requires interaction.  Punch, representative of British media sources, imposed external characteristics and value on Irish issues. 

Political cartoons convey messages more quickly and successfully than editorials to less literate readers while highlighting underlying societal assumptions on which the opinions expressed in the cartoon are formed.  Presented over a period of forty years, the Irish issues and characters in the images progress from threatening to inconsequential—sketches from the end of this period even seem to bear a modicum of respect.  The images also develop from exaggerated caricatures to moderate sketches over this period—a subconscious reinforcement of cultural stereotypes. 

Certain themes of Irish character are constant in nationalist works from this forty-year period, while the political aims they outline evolve greatly.  These speeches and writings provide markers of an internal identity that attempted to refute elements of identity imposed by the majority culture.  Irish nationalist goals evolved from demands for land control to an Irish Parliament within the empire to cultural and political liberation from 1880 to 1923.  Irish nationalists emerged from this period with a tentative Free State and an independent cultural identity with which they developed economic, political, and cultural distinctiveness.

Celebrity athletes have been a focus of recent valuable research, as has the psychological impact of retirement on professional athletes. There remains, however, a gap in scholarship addressing the cultural role of former footballers and their leverage of personal celebrity in the context of developing a post-playing career. This article seeks to make a contribution to the literature regarding the roles that retired athletes can play off the field.
Crafted narratives allow celebrity athletes to endorse products as well as cultural values while active in competition. Narratives are story formats that order social events and meaning in recognisable patterns over time. This article explores the overarching social and sporting values embedded in these storylines. It also investigates the current occupations of retired celebrity athletes and the extension of such values to these career changes via a meaning transfer process.
The analysis examines professional athletes in association football and American football and women’s soccer codes following the end of their active playing careers. Unpacking biographical and sporting narratives, the study seeks to better articulate the cultural values they comprise.

If sport is a universal language, advertising surrounding the FIFA World Cup in the twenty-first century speaks volumes. Through careful expression of social and sport values these narratives reflect gender hierarchies, international sporting histories, and football custom. Themes of individual exhibition and personal choice contrast with sporting tradition; these advertising concepts leap off the pages and screen, enamoring and educating audiences.

As a structured series of values represented in story form, narratives of sport are rooted in shared meanings. Advertising narratives revolving around football from 2002 through 2007 are vital to the commodification and distribution of the sport. Through patterned presentations these narrative sets reveal values that allow the audience to quickly evaluate unfamiliar teams and players.

This study explores adidas and Nike advertising campaigns for the 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cups, as well as the 2003 and 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cups, in order to derive subcultural values of passion, choice, skill, and individuality. These campaigns feature contrasting themes of inclusion and modernity, as well as universality. The values that string the narratives together reflect hybridity and, an increasingly accessible, ‘imagined’ global football culture.

This paper is a thesis chapter that explores "age" as a social construction in newspaper media representations of professional football and tennis. Mediated sport discourses of international, professional sport may be viewed as cultural space in which the age complex takes shape. It is an environment constructed by, and consistently reframed by, age-related discourses that intersect with other aspects of identity – ‘race,’ ethnicity, gender, and sexuality – to create and reinforce inequality. For this reason, discourses of sport are excellent sites to examine age-related hierarchies in order to better understand the ways in which age is used as a cultural resource to inform and instruct broader relationships of power.