Toward a Cultural Sociology of the Consumption of “Fantasy Football Hooliganism”

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Poulton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Related Disorder ◽  
Fantasy Football

Football hooliganism has a wide appeal within popular culture. Numerous books, films, documentaries, digital games, and even stage plays have featured representations of the phenomenon. All are presentations of what could be termed “fantasy football hooliganism” in that they are attempts by the entertainment industry to represent, reproduce, or simulate football-related disorder for our leisure consumption. This article offers a conceptual framework (underpinned by the work of Blackshaw & Crabbe) for the sociological analysis of the consumption and production of these fantasy football hooliganism texts.

Batman Returns

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-215
Author(s):  
Martijn Oosterbaan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Politics Of Aesthetics ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Anthropological Literature

This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell us about the relations between popular imagery and political contestation has remained untouched. This article supports the work of writers who argue that superhero comics and movies present fierce figures that operate in the zone of indistinction, at the crossroads of lawful order and its exception. However, it adds to this literature an analysis that shows in what kind of sociopolitical contexts these figures operate and how that plays itself out. To understand the contemporary appearances and force of figures of the entertainment industry better, this article proposes the concept “popular culture of sovereignty.”

scholarly journals Playful Constructivism: Making Sense of Digital Games for Learning and Creativity Through Play, Design, and Participation

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Marone
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Learning Theories ◽  
Game Based Learning ◽  
Visual Model ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

The goal of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to better understand digital games in learning and creative contexts through the dimensions of play, design, and participation. This framework can be used as a guiding tool for the selection, implementation, and evaluation of game-based approaches in formal and informal educational settings, as well as a blueprint for making sense of playful learning and creativity in virtual worlds and technology-mediated environments. In essence, this article seeks to answer the question “What are digital games and how can we make sense of them for learning and creativity?” The proposed visual model and conceptual framework, here defined as Playful Constructivism, is grounded on the learning theories of Situated Cognition, Social Constructivism, and Constructionism, and draws from play and game studies, design-based learning, and affinity spaces research. This framework is not intended as the “ultimate” conceptualization of game-based learning, but rather as an agile tool that can guide scholars, practitioners, and students through the affordances, challenges, and opportunities of implementing and using digital games in learning and creative contexts.

scholarly journals Co-creating communities: Fandoms in tourism spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Reichenberger ◽  
Karen Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Empirical Verification ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Inherent Part

© The Author(s) 2019. Fandoms as expressions of popular culture are characterized by common interests and a sense of belonging and community. Creating and participating in communities is an inherent part of fandom, with tourism providing spaces for this community building to occur face to face. Overlaps between tourism and fandoms have been identified in popular culture (e.g. film tourism contexts); previous research, however, is characterized by disciplinary fragmentation and ambiguous transferability. This article introduces a conceptual framework of fan-based community co-creation, taking into account different intensities of fan involvement as well as factors that contribute to a psychologically perceived sense of community. The framework’s applicability to on-site tourism activities and fan-based events is illustrated, and recommendations for its empirical verification are provided.

The Sacred, Profane, Pure, Impure, and Social Energization of Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 483-506
Author(s):  
Dmitry Kurakin
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Dynamic Features ◽  
Cognitive Sociology ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Basic Model

In this chapter, I argue that the Durkheimian theory of the sacred is a crucial yet not fully recognized resource for cognitive sociology. It contains not only a theory of culture (which is acknowledged in contemporary sociology), but also a vision of culture-cognition relations. Thus, Durkheimian cultural sociology allows us to understand the crucial role the sacred/profane opposition plays in structuring culture, perception and thought. Based on a number of theories, I also show how another opposition—between the pure and impure modes of the sacred, allows us to explain dynamic features of the sacred and eventually provides a basic model of social change. While explicating this vision and resultant opportunities for sociological analysis I also criticize “cognition apart from culture” approaches established within cognitive sociology. I argue, thus, that culture not only participates in cognition but is an intrinsic ingredient of the human mind. Culture is not a chaotic and fragmented set of elements, as some sociologists imply to a greater or lesser degree, but a system; and as such it is an inner environment for human thought and social action. This system, however, is governed not by formal logic, as some critics of the autonomy of culture presuppose, but by concrete configurations of emotionally-charged categories, created and re-created in social interactions.

Undead Avatars

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewan Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Digital Form ◽  
Horror Genre

In contrast to other forms of popular culture, zombies have a historically consistent presence within digital games. Extending research which explores self-reflexivity across the horror genre, this chapter examines ways in which videogame zombies comment upon the nature of the digital form and its player relationship. Central to this analysis is an argument that the videogame avatar, the figure which players control, is itself zombie-like, a dead thing given life through the cybernetic interface of the player. Successful play entails the user becoming machine-like in their engagement with the videogame’s digital apparatus. Exploring games such as Quake, Resident Evil and Forbidden Siren, it is argued that zombies within horror videogames function as a metaphor for uncanny processes at work within the videogame medium itself.

It’s About Faith In Our Future

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jindra
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Star Trek ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
Cultural Themes

This chapter examines the fandom that has grown up around the Star Trek movies and television series, arguing that the entertainment industry also creates meanings that begin to function in religious ways for consumers of popular culture. Popular culture has become an independent producer of mythical narratives, a reflection of cultural themes and a producer of new ones. Though often using indirect religious themes and imagery (as in Star Wars or Harry Potter), the narratives and messages have been formally cut off from the religious traditions that have dominated Western culture over the centuries. In other words, parts of popular culture have taken their place alongside the mainstream religious traditions, ideologies, and narratives that have guided people's lives.

China's commercial media will recover from crackdown

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Consumer Protection ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Commercial Media

Significance This is part of a broader wave of conservative moves against the country's freewheeling popular culture and entertainment industry, underlining President Xi Jinping's aspirations for greater social cohesion and 'common prosperity'. Impacts There will be stricter consumer protection rules related to television entertainment, particularly talent and reality shows. Some stars will be made into examples of misbehaviour, as highly visible, symbolic cases to scare the rest of the community into compliance. Like the broadcasting regulator, other parts of the bureaucracy will launch initiatives to demonstrate support for Xi's latest slogan.

Social Interaction as Key to Understanding the Intertwining of Routinized and Culturally Contested Consumption

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-416
Author(s):  
Bente Halkier
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Food Practices ◽  
Discursive Interaction

A number of concepts and concerns from cultural sociology were thrown out as babies with the bathwater when the sociological study of consumption became dominated by the use of practice theories. The concept of social interaction is one of them, perhaps due to assumptions about its association with symbolic and discursive interaction and reflexivity. In the field of sociological analysis of food conduct, however, there is a need for addressing both more culturally contested parts of food practices as well as more routinized parts. Food consumption and practices of provisioning, cooking and eating are both tacit, recursive, mundane activities, and at the same time discursively questioned through multiple, mediatized, cultural repertories of food. In the article, I will suggest how social interaction can be conceptualized as enabling the understanding of this intermingling of the culturally contested and routinized parts of consumption within a practice theoretical perspective. The conceptual suggestion consists in four analytical suggestions for how the culturally tacit and reflexive in food conduct become linked through social interaction. The four suggestions are about coordination, intersection, hybridity and normative accountability. The four suggestions are exemplified empirically on the basis of a number of qualitative studies of food conduct among Danish consumers.

scholarly journals Of Sound and Flavour – Revisiting the Notion of Material for the Cultural Sociological Analysis of Art Domains

2020 ◽  
pp. 174997552096960
Author(s):  
Isabelle Darmon
Keyword(s):  
Joint Attention ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sociology Of Art ◽  
Domains Of Life ◽  
Modes Of Engagement

This article proposes a possible path for a materialist cultural sociology of art, focusing on the dynamics of art(s) domains and harnessing Adorno’s dialectical notion of material anew. I seek to establish links between dynamics of the arts domains and the fostering of specific modes of engagement with them – and, potentially, stances in other domains of life. I argue that a return to Adorno’s notion of (musical) material allows for such connections to be made: the ‘material’ is where the dynamics of the specific arts domains are inscribed; but it is also what is engaged with – by composers and artists as well as by interpreters, performers and publics. A dialectical material lens seems well suited for the critical study of the dynamic of arts domains in the 20th and 21st centuries, given the multiple artistic ‘breaks’ proclaimed. Focusing on some well-known movements in music and cuisine which sought to ‘emancipate’, ‘democratise’, and ‘diversify’ sounds and flavours, I analyse the processes through which they produced sound and flavour anew. I suggest that sounds and flavours themselves have become the carriers of logics relevant to music and cuisine, and that they have come to imperiously command modes of commitment (from composers and chefs, performers, listeners and diners alike) that evince specific stances. Through this necessarily sketchy survey, I provide indications that broader, cross-cutting cultural dynamics may be at stake. Overall, I seek to make clear what theoretical steps are afforded by the joint attention to materiality and the dynamic of art domains.

scholarly journals Is sociologie klaar voor de mediasamenleving?

Sociologie ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-242
Author(s):  
Giselinde Kuipers
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Phone Call ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Media Society ◽  
Bare Bones

Abstract Is sociology ready for media society? A quick survey of recent sociology journals shows that as far as sociologists are concerned, social life is not very different from how it was in the 1980s: primarily based on face-to-face interactions, written communication, print media and an incidental phone call. The essay then presents a ‘bare bones’ version of sociology to show how the recent processes of accelerated mediatisation affects the basic ingredients of sociological analysis ‐ interaction, culture and social structure ‐ as well as the relation between these ingredients. It ends with an invitation to sociologists. For each study you do: ask yourself could this be done with the same methods or concepts in 1975? If so, consider adapting your design or conceptual framework to incorporate at least some elements related to the recent wave of mediatisation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document