Friday 27 November 2015

Sports Criminology: Indications of content

I've nearly completed the second draft of my Sports Criminology book for Policy Press. Set out below is the index, and still being compiled, which gives some indication of the breadth of my intentions. How come Quidditch and the Edinburgh Festival rate mentions? Or Haffoty Wen Outdoor Activity Centre and Sepp Blatter?


Adams, Nicola
administrative criminology
aerobics
aggression
All Party Parliamentary Group on Boxing
amateur
American Gaming Association
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
amphetamine
anti-doping
Armstrong, Lance
athletics
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Australia
‘autodressage’
Automobile Association
badger baiting
badges for baseball
badminton
‘BadmintonGate’
BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative)
bare-knuckle
baseball
basketball
Beckham, David
betting
biological positivism
‘biosocial’
black letter law
black masculinity
Blatter, Sepp
‘BloodGate’
blood sports
Bollywood
‘BountyGate’
Bosman
bowling alley
boxing
Boxing Academy
boycott
Brady, Tom
brain damage
Brasil
brawling
bribery
bridge
Bring Back Borstal
British Boxing Board of Control
British Horseracing Authority (BHA)
Bryant, Kobe
bull-baiting
bull dog
‘camp’
caffeine
Calcio Storico
Cantona, Eric
CCTV
celebrity
‘central’ sports
cheat
cheating
Chicago School
China
crime control
christian
chucking
Cipriani, Danny
class
classicism
Clear, the - see THG
cock-fighting
Coe, Sebastian
Commonwealth v Collberg
conflict theory
‘controlology’
control theories
corruption
counterfeit
Countryside Alliance
Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS)
‘CrashGate’
cricket
crime prevention
Cronje, Hansie
crowd violence
cultural criminology
cultural spillover
cycling
‘dead rubbers’
‘deflategate’
delinquents
desistance
Denning, Lord
differential association
‘diving’
dog-fighting
domestic violence
doping
drink
drink driving
drugs
cheats
occupational
performance enhancing
recreational
due process
Duke of Edinburgh Award (DoE)
Dwain Chambers
‘EarGate’
ectomorph
edgework
Edinburgh Festival
Enderby Town FC v The Football Association
Epilepsy
endomorph
eSports
ethnography
Europol
eugenics
Fairbridge
falconry
fantasy sports
Farah, Mo
feminism
field sports
FIFA
Fight Club
fighting
Fight for Peace
finasteride
Flood V. Kuhn
food allergies
football
Football Behind Bars
football hooliganism
fouls
Four Four Two 
fox hunting
fraud
France
functionalism
gambling
gamesmanship
gang
Gasquet, Richard
Gatlin, Justin
gay
Gay Future
gender
Germany
Girlfight
Giro d’Italia
gladiators
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women
golf
gothic criminology
‘governing through doping’
Grace, W.G.
Grand National
Griffith, Emile
gymnastics
gypsy
green criminology
Haffoty Wen Outdoor Activity Centre
Hamilton, Tyler
Harding, Tonya
harm perspective
harm-reduction
health
hegemonic masculinity
high ropes courses
hockey
Holyfield, Evander
Home Office
homophobia
hormone
horse racing
hunting
Hussein, Nasser
Hyde, Marina
hypermasculinity
hyperandrogenism
IAAF
ice hockey
Indian Premier League
International Golf Federation
International Olympic Committee
International Tennis Federation
Italy
IQ
‘jock’
Jockey Club
Johnson, Jack
Jones, Marion
joyriding
jukebox
justice
Kid’s Company
labelling
Landis, Floyd
LaShawn Merritt
League Against Cruel Sports
left-handedness
left realism
lesbian
lex olympica
London Olympic and Paralympic Games Act 2006
Lord Lonsdale
low-blood sugar
Lund, Zach
Luzira Prison
macho
‘malestream’
Mäntyranta, Eero
Maradona, Diego
Marquis of Queensbury
martial arts
marxism
masculinities
Mayweather, Floyd
Meca-Medina and Majcen v Commission
medical marijuana
‘mega events’
mesomorph
methodology
methods
midnight basketball
Millar, David
Miller v Jackson
Million Dollar Baby
Modafinil
Modahl, Diane
moral development
moral panic
morphine
motor projects
motor sports
muscular christianity
muslim
National Hunt
National Collegiate Athletic Association
NBA
Netball
new criminology
NFL
NHL
neurotransmitter imbalances
neutralisation
nutrition
‘old firm’ effect
Olympics
boycotts
London
Outward Bound
‘operant conditioning’
 organised crime
‘overconformity’
Pakistan
Paralympics
Paret, Benny ‘Kid’
parkour
parole
peacemaking
Pechstein, Claudia
pinball
Porridge
‘positive deviance’
positivism
Premier League
probation
Prince’s Trust
prison
Prison Fight
professional
protest masculinity
psychoanalysis
psychodynamic
public school
Puritans
Quakers
queer
Quidditch
Radcliffe, Paula
radical criminology
racism
rational choice theory
rape
red card
referee
respect
Rice, Ray
right realism
riot
roller blading
roller derby
routine activity
rowing
Rugby League
Rugby Union
running
rural criminology
rural sport
Russia
sado-masochism
sailing
Salazaar, Alberto
Sarkeesian, Anita
scandals
Scott, James
Semenya, Caster
serial killers
sexism
sexual assault
sexual violence
Scotland
Shankly, Bill
shooting
show jumping
‘SkateGate’
‘sin bin’
social control
social control theory
sociology of sport
South Africa
Simpson, O. J.
simulation
sin
situational crime prevention
skateboarding
skating
skiing
sky diving
Solo, Hope
somatype
sport in prison
‘sportization process’
Sports Based Initiative
sports law
Sports Related Crimes
steroid
strain theory
‘Strategic Intentional Fouls’
Streeter, Alison
Suarez, Luis
sub-cultural theory
Sumo
Super Bowl effect
supplements
surveillance
swimming
Taekwondo
taketac
tattoos
‘textbookification’
terrorism
testosterone
Tevez, Carlos
Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs)
Thailand
THG (tetrahydrogestrinone)
The Great Gatsby
Thorne, Willie
three strikes
tiddlywinks
Tough Mudder
Tour de France
track (and field)
transparency
Traveller
triathlon
TV
Tyson, Mike
umpire
United States
via ferrata
Vick, Michael
video games
Doom, Dota 2, Follow the Money, Grand Theft Auto, Hearthstone, League of Legends Ultra Street Fighter IV, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Tekken Tag Tournament II
victim
victimology
Victorians
violence
volenti non fit injuria
‘voodoo criminology’
vitamin
WADA
walking
Walrave and Koch
‘wanted deviance’
war on drugs
water polo
wheelchair marathon
Wilde, Oscar
Williams, Venus
women
Woods, Tiger
World Cup
wrestling
yellow card
yoga
Xpro
XYY
zemiology
zero tolerance
zip wires
‘zombie discipline’
‘zookeepers of deviance’

zumba

Monday 12 October 2015

Sailing - drugs, terrorism, #uppermiddleclasswhitepeopleproblems

According to the BBC’s Sport website ‘Banned substances were found in more than 3,800 samples out of 283,304 tests’ in 2014 according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). This represents 1.34% adverse findings. Such findings share some of the same problems as the Crime figures. There is a dark figure of undetected - and histories of unreported or collude at - usage but with aid of science and technology even past usage can now be retrospectively surveilled. The logic of surveillance is such that no doubt WADA will not be happy until it can test all athletes all the time in real time. And many athletes will subscribe to that, giving up their human rights and endangering others.

Readers of my blog will know that, as criminologist, I don’t support the ‘war on drugs’ in society and therefore in sport. This post does not seek to raise again that but to pick up on some issues that piqued my interest in the figures.

Unsurprisingly as large nations China (13,180) and Russia (12,556) have the most tests. China had only 0.4% adverse results, Jamaica none from its 347 tests and 50% from Ukraine (1 of two!). Football was the most tested Olympic sport 31,242 (144 or 0.5% adverse) followed by Athletics 25,830 (261 representing 1% adverse). Again nobody would be surprised that Weightlifting’s failure rate was higher with 1.9% for its 8,806 tests.  More surprising might be Paralympic Sailing which had one of the highest rates of adverse results, with 13%! though this was just for 24 samples with three adverse findings.

My eye however was caught by the failure of two sailors of the 795 tests (0.3% failure) and when trying to find out who they might be stumbled upon yet more interesting stuff serendipitously. Thus we find that Israeli yachtsman, Udi Gal (470 Class) tested positive for finasteride before the Beijing Olympics. Finasteride can be found in baldness cures and was not on WADA’s list until 2005 and was removed in 2008. It was thought to be a masking agent. Zach Lund’s career was nearly ended by suspension for its use. Once a luger he now represents USA in skeleton. He is still bald.

We also learn that another sort of sailor also has problems with drugs. Apparently the Royal Navy drug testing found 63 sailors positive for illegal substances between October 2007 and July 2011.

More off the wall we find Glenn McCarthy’s blog pointing out the indignities of drugs testing but more interestingly the extent of drug taking that will be required of the sailors because of fears for their health in the polluted waters off Rio where their events are held.

But most piquant is the experience of Stop and Search by members of the Royal Yachting Association detailed on this page. They opine:
From the RYA's point of view, we support the UKBA’s work in providing a national surveillance and interception capability to protect the UK from terrorism and criminality, but the RYA believes that the recreational boating public should not routinely be regarded as suspects.

A selection of members experiences are set out. First the bad.
As they approached we were told to hold our course and speed, and before we knew it, three of these guys STORMED over the guard rails, pushed past me in the cockpit and dived straight down below with the third member remaining in the cockpit.
Protestations and questions about had they any rights to do this were greeted with a barked response that absolutely they could do it. All in the demeanour of keep out our road or pay the consequences.
This was a very aggressive, and, if we had been bad guys, I’ll admit, a professional and effective boarding.   But we weren’t bad guys. We were one mid 50’s couple and one mid 60’s cruising to our summer marina in Oban and I don’t think we look like drug runners.
The streets of London come to the Isle of Jura!

Or this suffered by more middle aged people including a University of London professor:
A large rib came alongside, all black, and four individuals jumped on board without a word...  I was very surprised because our new toy, the AIS, had not shown any contacts and we had seen no lights, so was the mother ship transmitting its AIS identity?
My belief is that it was hiding behind the Needles or not transmitting... They started aggressively with "Why did you slow up in the narrows? Where are your passports?" My No. 2 who does not like this sort of thing said, " We didn't know Devon had seceded from England so what are you on about?”

But others toe the party line.
Yes, they are riot police with life jackets, but once aboard and in the cockpit they got on with their job in a pleasant manner, apart from being a little surprised by finding a lone yachtswoman.  …
All I can say to these poor old chaps is, get a perpective on things. With our freedom to sail the seas of Britain comes a responsibility to look out for things that are illegal. These guys can't be expected to know who's aboard, or if you are up to no good or not.
Give'em a break, they are working for you, to keep our nation free of  the scum that bring in drugs.
And more nuanced:
As sailors we have enjoyed freedom of movement without harrassment from officialdom for a long time. Unfortunately the criminal mentality has caught on to this freedom and not unexpectedly taken advantage of it as is evidenced by several recent court cases involving drug runners and illegal immigrants.

If the UK Border Agency are going to adopt a heavy handed attitude due their enormous powers and adopt a bully boy attitude they are  going to lose all support from a section that could well provide them with valuable information. Leisure sailors are unlikely to report suspicious activity if they have recently been harassed by that same agency.
One hates to imagine what would happen if you had a yacht and were black.


Monday 10 August 2015

Redhead parks a theoretical bus in front of goal

A review of Steve Redhead’s (2015) Football and Accelerated Culture: This Modern Sporting Life Routledge

I’ve tweeted some potted reviews of early chapters of this book and even linked to the video in which the author is interviewed by his wife. Many of these have been retweeted by them.

My first tweet was not RT’d and my last not so far. The first tweet read
engaging chapter 1 really preface/intro with enough music mentions to float @TimNewburn boat but poor index!
More popular were:
Ch2 Football and Accelerated Culture roars down left wing exchanging 1-2s with Baudrillard, Badiou and Virilio. Will score? 
in Ch 3 of Football and Accelerated Culture @steveredhead bigs up his firm (university archive) and 'hits and tells' about #criminology 
also picks out the ‘camp’ in hyper-masculinity #footballaccelaratedculture I’ll claim that for #queercriminology
ch 5 mixes hooligan memoirs with some academic ones of his own - his greatest hits 
mentions @DonalMacIntyre journalism not his professorship 
So far my final tweet has gone unanswered.
What do pages 58 and 74 have in common?
The answer is a very lengthy and identical quote (third of a page) from ‘Pete Walsh, publisher of Milo books’. Readers of subtext might see some criticism in the other tweets too but no subtlety is intended in my complaint about the index. I’ve complained in the past about the index in other titles in Routledge’s Research Sport, Culture and Society series. Rosie Meek’s Sport in Prison is compromised by a poor one but I’ll return to this from time-to-time as the are other complaints and some praise to attend to.

It is appropriate that some of my first thoughts were dashed off quickly on social media and the index has mentions of Twitter on pages, 1, 9, 12-15, 19, 76 and 80 only missing the discussion on page 40 of the campaign demanding justice for the 96 (Hillsborough #jft96). The accelerated culture of Twitter means I can, with sufficient wit, give the impression of deep reading but the slower pace of writing this blog with quill pen by candle light demands more.

I think the book better illustrates the acceleration of culture than football does. I’ve been supporting football less assiduously than Steve and only slightly longer but for all the changes many things have not changed. The length of match and the means of deciding the game have not changed. What has changed is the amount of space (I’m not sufficiently aware of Virilio’s work - and Redhead’s 34 mentions largely assume you are - to know if his dromology covers time and space) given to sport, specifically football. Once only the cup final enjoyed as much pre and post match speculation and analysis but even the most mundane, end-of-season, mid-table match is declared the wonder of our age.

Twitter is quick and this book has been written quickly. I used some football metaphors in my tweets but cricket fits the purpose better here. Cricket has become quicker with a variety of short forms that some blame for the speed of even its full test version. Redhead is found at the crease knocking the bowling of those less versed in high theory to boundary in a series of aperçus, reminiscences and boasts (which might have been demoted to footnotes) about his knowledge, connections and archive.

Tackling that high theory we find that he is attracted to Virilio’s work (but rejecting his idealist phenomenology) and to Baudrillard’s late (in his life and posthumously published) work (31 mentions) and dislikes attempts to position such work as either modern or post modern, preferring the term late modern. Zizek appreciatively mentioned nearly a dozen times.

He knows his criminology and criminologists (nearly 30 mentions but no index entry!) but you will need to them too as he rarely goes beyond a sketch or name check, save for a big shout out to Steve Hall and Simon Winlow’s Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology (TCRC) though not all of TCRC’s mentions are indexed and none of Hall and Winlow’s half dozen citations are indexed. Sociology has no index entry despite nearly 20 mentions.

He deploys terms like Claustropolis, Claustopolitanism and Claustropolitan Sociology extensively and these gets many index mentions and much of this is foreshadowed in his earlier work when at Brighton. From Virilio ‘Claustopolitanism’ is the move from the cosmopolis that classical sociology has studied to the gated (figuratively and metaphorically) ‘communities’ of today that require his Claustropolitan Sociology, ‘or ‘bunker anthropology’.

In addition to the problems with the index and the elliptical nature of some references to high theory and score settling the writing is often unnecessarily dense. Sometimes this in the obscurantist manner of some cultural studies but also, and contrawise (and here I’m aping the style) legalistically with, asides, and conditional legalistic, deemed necessary - but please in another sentence - clauses.

Additionally, and here we are moving on from the speed of the writing, we have the speed of the production. It has clearly not been properly edited or sub-edited and for this I blame his publishers. Thus, in addition to the repeat of the quotes on pages 57 and 74 we find that the term ‘Pete Walsh, publisher of Milo books’ appears six times. The expression ‘What I have called, with a considerable irony’ appears on pages 23, 51 and 67 and again as ‘heavy irony’ on pages 70 and 78. Throughout I found myself thinking I’d already read something in this book or his earlier work which he promotes at length throughout.

But it is not all bad. I’ll quote his work on the ‘camp’ ness of the hyper-masculinity of some of his hooligans (p23) and the queer tone of Morrissey’s love of Georgie Best (p92). I’ll quote too his opinion that sporting mega events will not regenerate Cities but ‘resettle’ them (p80).

I am grateful to learn of ‘physical cultural studies’.
And the football? Quite. There are sometimes long quotes (whole pages!) from the 108 hooligan memoirs covering the years 1987-2014 held at Charles Sturt University which are part of his ‘hit and tell’ project (nearly 20 mentions in book but none in index). Many of the mentions are otiose and repetitive. The contents of the archive are set out in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 matches clubs and their ‘firms’ with the memoirs. A further appendix should have removed the unwieldy list of the ‘firms’ associated with various clubs that take up pages 29-31.

Most chapters start with a claim to link theory to the hooligan memoirs but most involve lengthy theoretical approach work and then some mention of those memoirs, diddling about the box, before shooting wide!

And finally back to the Index. As noted it is short and misses many of the most important topics, subjects and authors but it also includes some random elements. Reference to the Large Hadron Collider does appear on page 17 but only in most aleatory fashion. This book is as much about popular music as it is about football - and I agree with him about the need to treat sport as part of the cultural industries - though it is more about picking fights with fellow theorists, so it is worrying that Happy Mondays lose their second capital in the index though not throughout the text, as do Joy Division yet The Farm and The Hollies get their full appellation and Morrissey acquires his birth initial, ’S’ (and full name in text, p92).

I've torn this book apart. It should be disassembled and put together in a new order with greater eye to detail.  It might then meet Steve Hall's encomium for it:

Redhead’s state-of-the-art exploration of contemporary football culture is bursting with fresh ideas, which he applies with both imagination and precision to his object of study. This trenchant mixture of raw realism and high theory is exactly what is needed to break the study of football culture out of its current ailing paradigms and reset the coordinates for a new trajectory. A genuine pathfinder.