Breaking into the Press Box and After

Who are the people who create the images and reportage we consume? What ‘makes’ a journalist in the sporting field? More specifically, what drives a woman to break into the all-male citadel of sports media? Sharda Ugra’s perceptive and illuminating first person account of her journey through the media boxes of cricket fields is not just fascinating, but opens up a Pandora’ box where intersecting entities of gender, sports and media interact. Her account brings into the discourse on sports in society the tensions at play among those who report on a sport, the sportspersons, the editors and the constraints of deadlines and media demands. This autobiographical account offers scholars an opportunity to explore sports in the context of those who communicate sports to society.

Active surveillance as a collateral practice of contemporary pedagogical devices of the present time.

“A collateral victim”[1] of the Spanish flu epidemic: these are the words that Edgar Morin uses to define himself in his “Preamble: One hundred years of vicissitudes” (2020, p. 9), written during the lockdown imposed to stem the spread of Covid-19. Over a handful of pages, the French philosopher and sociologist gives a first-person account of his own personal life in relation to the history of the great crises of the 20th Century. His preamble to the book Let’s change lanes: Lessons of Coronavirus reads as follows: “The reader can now understand why I find it normal to expect the unexpected and to foresee that the unpredictable may happen”[2] (p. 22). Over the course of the text, Morin’s readers are also brought to understand why the author has not “completely lost hope” (ibidem). Hence, the beauty of the words of Morin, as a “transversal thinker” (Montuori, 2019, p. 408), is collateral: his lucid analysis does indeed retrace the catastrophic events that have arisen during the pandemic, underlining human beings’ predisposition to dystopian attitudes, yet it simultaneously highlights key steps towards fostering that humanism necessary to change the path. If aesthetics, according to the definition given by its founder Baumgarten (1750), is the “sensory theory”[3] (Tedesco, 2020, p. 9), perhaps the key to grasping the collateral beauty of adverse events lies in implementing knowledge of sensibilities, i.e. that ability to envisage the unexpected (Morin, 2020, 2001), to understand that pain is part of life (Han, 2020), to “think emotions, feel thoughts”[4] (Mortari, 2017), to listen to the Other because it concerns us (Levinas, 2002). This contribution aims to relate some findings of contemporary Italian pedagogy, which, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, are exploring those sensibilities able to deal with the unexpected, considering the concepts of uncertainty, margin and care from a phenomenological perspective (Mortari & Camerella, 2014). Educational practices, brought to the fore by the academic community in the field of education, become an active surveillance tool to provide a response to current issues that is not only theoretical, but also empirical and “operational”[5] – i.e. “capable of directing and orienting its choices in a strategic way in contexts where highly critical situations occur” (Isidori & Vaccarelli, 2013, pp. 16–17).

Why Would You Referee?

Adopting a creative yet novel autoethnographic approach, this study explores the experiences of the first author, a newly qualified footballing official. In doing so, the study provides a first person account to showcase the realities of refereeing whereby adding to a small pool of refereeing literature in the process. In providing an evocative account with a theoretical analysis, the research aims to both showcase and explain the demands associated with the position. Therefore, by constructing the said narratives in an easy to understand manner, the study looks to showcases the challenges associated with officiating to a broad audience. While, the study gives a viable explanation to why many newly qualified referees drop out from the role, the study hopes to inform and subsequently aid aspiring officials in their ongoing development.

From signs of language and culture to semioses of life: appreciating Tom Sebeok’s role in the building of global semiotics

This paper is an attempt at evaluating the advancement of the conceptual and methodological framework of semiotics across its neighboring disciplines as launched and promoted by Thomas Albert Sebeok on a worldwide scale. Writing in a first-person account, the author describes, firstly, his own road to the semiotic study of linguistics, owing to the acquaintance with editorial outputs as well as with the professional proficiency of this founding father of global semiotics as a visiting scholar with an affiliation in the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of Indiana University at Bloomington. And secondly, he also tries to assess the power of Sebeok’s influence on the career progress of his contemporaries, scholars, followers, and pupils. Some of them, including the author himself, acted soon after as distinguished masters of particular semiotic disciplines or organizers of international enterprises. Finally, the author provides an epistemological evaluation of semiotic thresholds in the research activities of scientists.

What The Slants’ First Amendment Case at the Supreme Court Actually Won

This is a first-person account of the First Amendment case that rocked the nation. Much has been written about The Slants’ trademark case, which was decided at the Supreme Court, from NPR to Rolling Stone, but nearly everything published focused on the Washington Football team’s name and fear about a floodgate of hate speech. This article provides the argument for freedom of expression using an equity lens, moving it from abstract legal theory to a personal account of what the legal system and its procedures are actually like for those who wish to create social change.

Unsavory Characters

From early works such as “Ralo” (1997) to the more recent “Black Fox Valley” (2012), the acclaimed Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup has demonstrated a consistent interest in the impact of the Chinese language on Tibetan life. This article examines the techniques and implications of Tsering Döndrup's use of Chinese in his Tibetan language texts, focusing on his recent novella “Baba Baoma” (2019), the first-person account of a rural Tibetan boy who attends a Chinese school and ends up stuck between two languages. In a major departure from Tsering Döndrup's previous work on the language problem, this text directly incorporates untranslated Chinese characters, blending them with Tibetan transliterations and Hanyu Pinyin (i.e., the Latin alphabet) to create a deliberately disorienting linguistic collage. This article argues that this latest work pushes Tsering Döndrup's previous experiments to their logical conclusion: a condition of forced bilingualism, in which the author demands of his readers fluency in Chinese in order to access his Tibetan language fiction. This critique of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic crisis puts the author's work into conversation with global postcolonial literatures and the politics of resistance to language hegemony. By demonstrating the Tibetan language's capacity for literary creation, the story effectively resists the hegemony it depicts, even while it suggests that the Tibetan literary text itself is in the process of being fundamentally redefined by its unequal encounter with the Chinese language.

Messiness in international qualitative interviewing: What I did, what I didn’t do, and a little bit about why

This is a reflexive account of the messiness experienced by a Persian-Australian doctoral researcher interviewing social work and human service practitioners and people seeking asylum in Germany. This data collection was part of a cross-national comparative study of the impacts of policy on the experiences and perceptions of people seeking asylum and social work and human service practitioners in Bavaria and Western Australia. Through interview stories and the work of others, this article offers a first person account of the complexities, ambiguities and dilemmas that can occur before, during and after data collection, how these were navigated through the use of Finlay's (2012) five lenses for the reflexive interviewer, and some of the lessons learnt.

Bad debt: The women’s mobilization against the financial industry in Kyrgyzstan

This article offers a first person account of women’s mobilization against banking and microfinance sectors in Kyrgyzstan. It focuses on the key factors for the evolution of the anti-debt movement, and women’s political strategies to problematize interest and to denaturalize the discourse of financial inclusion. For many years, the financial industry has operated a gendered process of neoliberal capital accumulation under the guise of empowerment that has produced tensions between transnational capital and marginalized women. Building upon Bourdieusian ideas on social movements, the study shows the significance of strain and situational definition in the formation of the anti-debt mobilization. The article uses in-depth interviews with the leaders and activists of the anti-debt movement and borrowers to explore how gender, class and capital were intertwined. It contributes to the literature on post-Soviet politics by challenging the dominant elite-centered frameworks, which are inadequate to explain local movements and gendered activism.