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ACADEMIC BOOKS

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Ethnographic Borders and Boundaries

Permeability, Plasticity and Possibilities

Immigrants, migrants, displaced, and diasporic persons: all have been constrained or enabled by borders of some sort.

 

This book explores international cases of how and why such boundaries come to be; who is affected by socially constructed borders; what it means to individuals and nation-states to recognise and deal with arbitrary divisions; and finally, what might be done to find – and act on – solutions to the inequity wrought by these borders and boundaries.

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Southern Hemisphere Ethnographies of Space, Place, and Time

This book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the Global South. It brings together a wide range of authors who explore the spatial and temporal forms of various ethnographic projects, examining how individuals relate to their homes, their nation-states and their «moments» and trajectories.

 

It also seeks to contest the twenty-first-century hegemonic colonialist project: to this end, the book includes a number of shorter chapters that are presented in both English and non-English versions. Finally, a clear contemporary Indigenous voice runs through the volume, reminding us of non-dominant ways of being in the world.

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Global South Ethnographies

Minding the Senses

Both an introduction to sensory ethnography and a bold display of the sophisticated use of the sensory for contemporary ethnography, Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses reflects both indigenous and non-mainstream takes on the sensory and the sensual in ethnographic practice.  

 

The authors provide a collection of original and timely chapters from both the hegemonic northern and Global Southern hemispheres. As the chapters stem from across a variety of disciplines, the book gives us novel ways of determining and perceiving the sensory.   

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Ethnographies in Pan Pacific Research

Tensions and Positionings

The book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the vibrant and growing global interface which includes Australia, New Zealand, and some of the Asian geographical regions, as well as - more broadly - the global South. It explores ethnographic writing as culture(s) (re)produced, positionalities of authors, tensions between authors and others, multi-faceted groups, and as co-productions of these works.

 

The contributors describe and discuss a variety of topical areas of interest, from Facebook to memory work, from children's sexuality to urban racism, from meanings of Indigenous knowledge to how communities can come together to retain what is valuable to themselves. The authors also manage to locate themselves and others (positionings) in the research hierarchies (tensions). This is a valuable guide to the effects of 21st-century ethnography on the qualitative research project.

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Sport and the Social Significance of Pleasure

This innovative text's critical examination foregrounds the prime reason why so many people participate in or watch sport – pleasure. Although there has been a "turn" to emotions and affect within academia over the last two decades, it has been somewhat remiss that pleasure, as an integral aspect of human life, has not received greater attention from sociologists of sport, exercise and physical education.

 

This book addresses this issue via an unabashed examination of sport and the moving body via a "pleasure lens." It provides new insights about the production of various identities, power relations and social issues, and the dialectical links between the socio-cultural and the body. Taking a wide-sweeping view of pleasure - dignified and debauched, distinguished and mundane – it examines topics as diverse as aging, health, fandom, running, extreme sports, biopolitics, consumerism, feminism, sex and sexuality. In drawing from diverse theoretical approaches and original empirical research, the text reveals the social and political significance of pleasure and provides a more rounded, dynamic and sensual account of sport.

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Ethnographic Worldviews

Transformations and Social Justice

This book discusses ethnography from the three points of view of Emerging Methodologies, Practice and Advocacy, and Social Justice and Transformation, with an over arching emphasis on researchers' and participants' worldviews. While these three thematic threads cut across each other, the actual chapters will be located so that the reader understand many of the current issues and concerns—with specific exemplars from around the globe—for ethnographers. 'Ethnographic Worldviews: Transformations and Social Justice' will have its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary ethnography. Chapters demonstrate up-to-the-moment awareness of ethnographic methods, concerns, and subject matters within contemporary ethnographic writing.

 

Authors are deeply engaged in both their subject matter and their method. For example, discussion of ethical issues surrounding visual methods of "collecting" for photo-ethnographies is anticipated as a potential hot topic for this book. Unlike other ethnographic books which often suggest "giving voice to others", this book will actually give voice to a wide variety of perspectives, from the points of view of researchers.

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Inline Skating in contemporary sport

True or false: Roller skating, in its quad form, has been around longer than inline skating. True or false: Aggressive Rollerblading® is the only form of inline skating that people practice. Of course, both of these statements are false. This new ebook, Inline skating in contemporary sport - An examination of its growth and development, looks at various forms of inline skating—ranging from aggressive to marathon to artistic skating—in terms of history, equipment, organizations, and inventors and stars. Rinehart also examines some of the current issues and trends within these forms of inline.

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Ethnographic practice(s) and symbolic interaction

Work from the Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines hui

Rarely are we invited to know the where of a writer’s writing; not the stance or angle or point of view they take on their narrative, but rather, the physical space and time they occupy as they write. This, of course, is an integral facet of the writer’s craft – and perhaps art. Writers (or in this case, ethnographers) may write “winter wonderland” tales in summer, or pieces exploring the inner workings of mind while on an impressive, event-packed holiday. They may write with calm and ease while flying at 11,277 meters above the Tasman Sea in a jostling, raucous ride that tests the resolve of all who fly. They may end up taking notes at their chosen “site,” transcribing in cramped student quarters, and writing in between early-morning feedings. Does place (and, come to it, time) affect what they have to say? What they choose to write? How they – or we – interpret what “facts” or “data” or “evidences” they call to bear on their individual take of the “truth”?

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To the Extreme

Alternative Sports, Inside and Out

An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes like Jake Burton and Arlo Eisenberg, look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two essays: one written by a scholar active in some aspect of research for the given activity, and another by a practitioner/athlete who writes "from the inside out." The juxtaposed essays confront questions about the essence of sport such as, What is sport?; How does it originate?; and What is its use, value, and function?

 

This book offers a fascinating look at how twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport forms emerge, proliferate, and take hold in a sport-crazy world.

Players All Performances in Contemporary Sport
Players All

Performances in Contemporary Sport

"Players All is a stunning accomplishment, an agenda-setting work; it opens the space for a bold, and innovative, critical, performance-based discourse on mass sport, sport as entertainment, and spectatorship in the global, postmodern society." —Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

In a book that is both scholarly and engagingly personal, Robert E. Rinehart takes us into the world of contemporary sport performances, from the Olympic Games to "The eXtreme Games," the Super Bowl to "The American Gladiators." He introduces us to sports tourism and the highly commercialized world of global sport. Rinehart analyzes the emergence of such "sports" as paint ball (and its associations with the Vietnam War) and indoor rock climbing (and its links to environmentalism and self-mastery). He shows how sports have become theatrical events and paints a revealing portrait of the new postmodern culture of sports.

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