1st Edition

The Containment of Soccer in Australia Fencing Off the World Game

Edited By Christopher Hallinan, John Hughson Copyright 2010
    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    164 Pages
    by Routledge

    According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, outdoor soccer was the second most popular organized sport for Australian children after swimming. It far outstripped the popularity of the three other football codes that are played in Australia – rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football.

    Yet the soccer participation phenomenon in Australia is matched neither by the media coverage of the game in these countries, nor by the academic interest in the game. With a few notable exceptions in academic sports history, the game of soccer remains understudied in comparison with the other football codes. And, apart from some interest that is generated by World Cup campaigns, the media coverage of soccer is largely marginalized, and becomes most emphasized when reporting on aspects of ‘hooligan’ crowd behaviour.

    This book investigates some of the ways that soccer has been maintained as marginal to Australian identity, and why the sport remains vitally important to some marginalized groups within these communities.

    This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

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    The Communication Gesture of the Beijing Olympic Games  Chen Weixing, International Communication Studies Center, Communication University of China

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    Personal, Popular and Information Portals Olympic news and the Use of Mobile Phones among Migrant Workers in Fuzhou  LIU Jun, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Fuzhou University and Fujian Normal University

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    Public Diplomacy Games: A Comparative Study of American and Japanese Responses to the Interplay of Nationalism, Ideology and Chinese Soft Power Strategies around the 2008 Beijing Olympics  Christopher J. Finlay, The Annenberg School for Communication, The University of Pennsylvania, and Xin Xin, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Westminster

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    Biography

    Christopher Hallinan is Associate Professor with the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests are within the politics of ethnic, racial and national identities, youth studies, and ethnographic research methods.

    John Hughson is a Professor of Sport and Cultural Studies with the University of Central Lancashire. He was educated in Australia. His research interests are broadly within the social and historical study of culture with an emphasis on sport, particularly the connections between sport and other areas of culture including the arts.