Joshua Newman

Florida State University | FSU · Department of Sport Management

Esports is often described as a growing industry ripe with financial opportunities for young professional, competitive gamers. However, these claims rarely consider how income is distributed amongst players. This study uses prize earnings data from 2005 to 2019 to examine labor market inequality and related social inequalities and social stratifica...

In recent decades, the political, economic, and social environment in the Peoples’ Republic of China has opened up to inflows of commerce and culture from around the world. Consequently, the physical cultural practices within China have undergone a double-dialectical shift—whereby performing bodies now influence, and are influenced by, a shifting b...

In this study, we present three ‘embodiments’ of post-reform footballing China. Starting in 2015, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) initiated a series of reforms to advance player development, increase international success, and broaden the cultural appeal and commercial aspects of the sport. During this time, key footballing bodies have been...

With the expansion of the esports industry, there is a growing body of literature examining the motivations and behaviors of consumers and participants. The current study advances this line of research by considering esports consumption through an economic framework, which has been underutilized in this context. Specifically, the “attention economy...

In this article, we use narrative economics to analyze the social conditions promoting the growth in private investment in esports—specifically in North American esports teams and franchises. Investment in the esport industry has outpaced revenue growth and esport teams do not have a proven cash flow model. To understand this disjuncture, we draw u...

Recently, private and State actors within the Chinese economy have increasingly taken ownership of (or established other financial relationships with) major football clubs across Asia and Europe. In this study, we provide an abductive interpretation of a) the extent to which capital investitures in the sport are linked to State mandates to grow inf...

In this article, the authors provide a Deleuzoguattarian tracing of a specific set of relationships between traditional Chinese medicine, life, death, and football (soccer). More specifically, the authors examine political, economic, and cultural associations formed in and around the Quanjian Group, a major traditional Chinese medicine company once...

In this article, which is an expanded and updated adaptation of the 2018 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Presidential Address, I look at the challenges and opportunities presented to the field by the Sokal 2.0 hoax. Specifically, I look at issues of epistemology and politics as expressed in, and produced through, the field(s) of s...

Sport stadia are political objects that carry an environmental cost. The purpose of this research is to add to previous literature by theorizing the political process of stadium construction in a way that accounts for how environmental issues are introduced into the political process and, therefore, offers a more accurate lens through which to inte...

The New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2015 accusing them of operating illegal gambling platforms. Using actor–network theory, we show how DraftKings, FanDuel, the New York Attorney General, critics, and legislators were preoccupied with how much agency players possessed. They also understood agency as emerg...

The commercial and social ascendance of esports has become a source of considerable organisational, industrial, experiential and identity-based concern for those inside and outside the digital gaming field. Indeed, one major concern for self-identifying ‘gamers’ around the world is the extent to which the logics of professionalisation, spectaculari...

Much like the nation as a whole, the development of football in China has accelerated at unprecedented rates in recent years. The investment toward, participation in, and consumption of the sport has surged in the years following the Chinese Communist Party’s implementation of major 2015 reforms intended to (1) develop the domestic professional foo...

The extant literature suggests that the formation of social networks within local communities may be linked to both positive (e.g., health, social well-being) and negative (e.g., social segregation or stratification) outcomes. In this study, we examine the social networks formed at the structural level by parents of community-based youth sport prog...

The rise of Donald Trump has widely been seen as concurrent to the emergence of the “Alt-Right” that coalesces around intersecting themes of conservativism: White ethno-nationalist “race realism,” populism, misogyny, evangelical theocracy, border protectionism, and anti-liberalism. Media has been a key site of struggle in these developments, with a...

In recent years, Shanghai has become one of Asia's major players in the bidding for, and hosting of, international sporting events. Uniquely positioned by history (e.g., China's liberalized urban node to the globalizing economy, an imbedded urban cosmopolitanism) and geopolitics (e.g., a shift toward free market domestic political economy, a growin...

A positive approach to addressing mental health issues in workplaces advocates the examination of an untapped resource—psychological capital—as a potential positive construct in contemporary organizational behavior. The authors tested various antecedents and outcomes of psychological capital, and examined the role of this construct in psychological...

For university students in sport management programs, working in sports is often the end goal, and internships have become the most common curricular component for achieving this end. Sport management students bring to these internships various backgrounds and active fan attachments with sports that structure their work experiences and create certa...

Following decades of significant economic and political reform, a once-closed China has emerged as the world’s fastest growing and arguably most interconnected political economic system. In the context of what has been termed a “post-socialist” transition, China’s sport system has similarly undergone rapid marketization (bringing in market actors a...

In this article, we examine the local–global celebrity politics of former Chinese professional tennis player Li Na. We locate Li Na as representative of a growing class of Chinese celebrities who display both extraordinary popularity and enormous marketability. At the same time, Li Na’s noted “rebelliousness”—most especially her “fiery” personality...

Following the advent of hydraulic fracturing to effectively collect natural gas and oil, there has been growing interest in placing exploration and extraction wells in or adjacent to public park and forest systems across North America and Europe. At the heart of the debate about leasing public parkland is the concern that park acreage and accessibi...

During the 2008 Olympic Games, after years of environmental regulations, two months of short-term measures, and opportune weather, Beijing measured a record number of "blue sky days," at the same time reassuring international athletes and journalists the air was safe for competition and Beijing residents. We use this case to understand how environm...

The vast majority of North America’s professional sport arenas, ballparks and stadiums are publicly subsidized without direct approval from voters. In this article, we examine the discursive constitution of ‘no-vote subsidies’ within the public sphere, and in particular problematize the twinned production(s) of citizenship and democratic process in...

In this article, we explore the media and cultural politics of former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Tim Tebow. More specifically, we investigate paradoxical and contradictory media representations of Tebow as his celebrity surfaced within, and came to dominate, the Obama-era ‘American’ media landscape. In so doing, we draw lines of art...

In its most artless definition, political economy refers to the study of inter- and intrastate transaction—concerned in large part with the dialectics of state governance and the production/consumption functions therein. Many of us, with varying degrees of deliberation, have read the works of forerunning political economists such as Adam Smith (c....

Organized youth sports programs (YSP) provide opportunities for participation in physical activity, and represent an important part of the broader public health agenda in the U.S. YSP not only provide physiological health benefits through active participation, but also promote social relationships within communities. In this study, we (1) investiga...

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the p...

This article seeks to unsettle the taken-for-granted epistemological and ontological foundations upon which many curricular and research-based activities in contemporary sport management are grounded. With an emphasis on that academic field's development in the United States in particular, the author problematizes the underlying assumptions that gu...

This article provides a series of critical reflections on my recent encounters with the spaces and bodies of tourist Appalachia. As both researcher and returnee, I look back on various qualitative research activities that have brought me back home to the Appalachian tourist destination of Sevier County, Tennessee. In so doing, I also outline (1) th...

This article investigates the paradoxes of communicative liberalization. We explore the ways in which something as seemingly banal as backyard basketball—by being incorporated into the realm of Internet communication—is at once “opened up” to the media consuming public and yet invariably constrained by the corporate and spectacularizing technologie...

Taking up the critical theorization of death as an important, though ambivalent, popular hermeneutic, this article attempts to expand upon existing arguments by examining death in the popular framings of an ever-growing U.S. militaristic biocitizenship (Mbembe, Giroux, Butler, Murray, Arendt). By understanding death as posing an existential crisis...

In this article, the authors engage with three emerging debates germane to contemporary biopolitics: (a) How do we advance the critical interrogation of the biopolitics of human movement? (b) How and in what ways might we “move” about (and ideally against) regimes and systems of biopolitical subjectivity? and (c) How might “moving” methods of writi...

This article offers a critical analysis of the mediation and commercialization of “bum fighting” (videotaping two or more poverty stricken individuals engaged in low-dollar bloodsport). In recent years, the production of pugilism has emerged in the US as popular—and indeed highly lucrative—features of the media-sport landscape. This paper looks int...

This handbook provides a broad introduction to qualitative research to those with little to no background in the subject while simultaneously providing substantive contributions to the field that will be of interest to even the most experienced researchers. The first two sections explore the history of qualitative research, ethical perspectives, an...

In this article, we use the theories of Giorgio Agamben to conceptualize the contemporary American football training camp as a material and metaphorical "camp"-a "space of exception" or a zone of indistinction where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Our aim is not to sportingly trivialize the horrors of those camps about whi...

In this article, we offer commentary on moving bodies and the spaces they simultaneously inhabit and produce, pointing specifically to dominant rhythmologies of the contemporary market society. We offer as the article’s core thrust the pedagogical, political, and performative exigencies of the street: its traversal and occupation, its flow and stas...

Andrews (1999) has argued that under conditions of market-based liberalization, the sporting past has increasingly been put to use for the purposes of accumulation. This selectively rendered “sporting historicism,” he argues, results in “a pseudo-authentic historical sensibility, as opposed to a genuinely historically grounded understanding of the...

In this coda, I consider the oncoming and already-present "crises" (see Giardina & Laurendeau, this issue) which threaten to unsettle the Enlightenment (and its hermeneutic legacies) substrata scholars of sport and the active body rest their work upon. In so doing, I aim to take up a number of the questions posited by the guest editors in their cal...

This chapter focuses on the relationship between sport, the dominant modes of production, and how the body, when placed within sporting contexts, (re)produces modern capitalism's social class hierarchies. It outlines how scholars have conceptualized tensions arising from the relations of industrial capitalism, the body, and sport. The chapter speci...

The Pittsburgh Steelers serve as a critical space for the celebration of masculinity and working-class identity in the context of (post-)industrial America. Within this article, the authors chronicle the transformation of a city, a region, and a group of people, at once steeped in the hard life of steel production and factory work, now increasingly...

This article offers a series of autoethnographic reflections on suffering from physical symptoms associated with a paradox of praxis. More specifically, it mediates on the musculoskeletal pangs that come with a raised critical consciousness—or what Paulo Freire refers to in his teaching as conscientização—that stands as directly incongruent to livi...

Spectator sport entails unique individual and collective cultural practices, often bound to the production and negotiation of emotion. For instance, the neurophysiological mechanism of mirror neurons activated in imitation and empathy evidences the social functionality of collective emotions. Accordingly, in congruence with the token identity theor...

This article addresses the market logics on display at Penn State University in response to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, especially with respect to the idea of civic branding and community formation. The intersecting vectors of the corporate university, neoliberalism, and physical culture are highlighted to explain such a response. Responses to the...

This article examines postcolonial race politics and the re-centering of embodied whiteness and mediated white bodies as constituted through "white flight" and the so-called browning of rugby in New Zealand. Previous studies have problematized the ways in which rugby union is often framed within the national imaginary as a culturally unifying space...

This article critically examines the emerging field of physical cultural studies, especially its contributions to our understandings of “the body” in and through its ongoing relationship with the research act. That is, a focus on the confluence of the embodied self and the [auto-]ethnographic self as it relates to the conduct of inquiry. It also ad...

This article offers a reflexive [re]discovery of my own Whiteness, my own Southern-ness, and my own masculinity through ethnographic engagement with the “New Sporting South”; reporting on the juxtaposition of my new [critical performance scholar] self onto the spaces and social relations once inhabited by my old [working class, parochial, “Southern...

This article examines ‘the physical’ and ‘the possible’ as bound together in recent political engagements of and with professional athletes – for example, Rashard Mendenhall, Luke Scott, and members of the Phoenix Suns organization–who have recently become entangled with/in mainstream debates concerning the “war on terror” and Tea Party discourses....

In this article, we identify various points of ontological, epistemological, and methodological intersection from which an embodied, generative Physical Cultural Studies project can emerge. We follow scholars such as Ingham (1997) and Andrews (2008) in arguing that contemporary "body work" scholars might benefit from "framing" (Butler 2009) embodim...

In his bestselling sojourn, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz1 (1999) offers a timely journalistic anthropology of a contemporary U.S. South still wrestling with the last vestiges of an antebellum-borne, Jim Crow-era-refined, and segregationist-practiced cultural and raci...

Each NASCAR race is a unique spectacle. Usually starting around Friday afternoon, a convoy of literally thousands of race car-symbolized, American flag-adorning recreation vehicles, SUVs, and automobiles cut through race-specific traffic patterns (put in place and administered by dozens if not hundreds of local police officers). Serpentine trails o...

When Friedrich von Hayek sat down at the heights of World War II to write his seminal free market manifesto, The Road to Serfdom, he did so seeking a political solution to the rise in state-based totalitarianism that had come to cloak much of Europe (e.g., Hitler in Germany, Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain). Writ...

We have heretofore outlined that, on the balance sheet, NASCAR’s salient place within the cultural politics of the (paleo-/neo-) conservative/neoliberal conjuncture produced tremendously lucrative brand equity during the Bush vicissitude. By the of the 2007 season, NASCAR’s publically traded International Speedway Corporation reported revenues of $...

Freedom. If the nation’s tableau vivant of commercial imagery and political rhetoric—filled with patriotic slogans and All-American symbolism—has taught us anything over the years, it is that “freedom” is not just another word in the ongoing story of “America.” Freedom from what, or to do what, is often glossed over in order to get more directly to...

God is watching over the super speedway. Or at least it can be surmised by both believer and nonbeliever alike that, within the imagined community of NASCAR Nation, there exists a pervasive, if not inveterate, devotion to Christian orthodoxy—as well as a steadfast belief in the ideological precepts that give material “credence” to such biblicized p...

Sport. Politics. Neoliberalism. A veritable iron triangle of modern American life—awash with racism, sexism, class bias, greed, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, ideological warfare, monumental successes, and equally epic failures. As we have argued in this book, the racetrack is more than a sporting metaphor for the rotational counterbalance...

If automobility and its attendant location within the field of the NASCAR enterprise reveals anything about the nation’s political and economic trajectory over the past decade-plus, it is that the “domestic” infrastructure of an increasingly interconnected global economy—mined by Exxon-Mobil in the Gulf of Mexico, overlain with miles of criss-cross...

The history of petroleum overdependence (as a resource fueling broader systems of capital accumulation) and widespread anxieties over its global scarcity foregrounds both concerns for the state of twenty-first century American empire and the geopolitical militarism it necessitates. The “Global War on Terror” espoused by George W. Bush and his acoly...

This article examines the ways in which cultural and political intermediaries have endeavored to systematically reorganize the spectacles of North American stock car racing to reinscribe and re-present the hegemonic order of free-market capitalism. To this end, the authors draw from a complex synthesis of economic, social, and cultural theory to in...

This article profiles the ascent of stockcar racing from parochial pastime of the late industrial American South into an internationally-distributed corporate sport conglomerate. We explicate the role NASCAR (the sport's governing body), its spectacles, and its consumer-spectators played in reproducing the political, economic, and cultural conditio...

Written against the backdrop of the exploding popularity of NASCAR auto racing, the authors argue that the American South's post-Emancipation mediated history-and the signifiers through which it has been mediated-legislate a lingua franca of White privilege, White supremacy, and patriarchal hegemony. Under the auspices of a seemingly natural "herit...

This paper expands upon existing sports sponsorship 'match-up' research by offering an interview-driven, empirically-grounded, 'thick' description of the decision-making processes of sports organisations in developing athlete-sponsor-team relationships. By focusing on a particular NASCAR (The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) organisa...

This article contributes to an already vibrant discussion on the politics of race and ethnicity as mobilized through the semiotic embodiments of sporting mascots. Grounded in a poststructuralist theoretical framework, guided by the political thrust of cultural studies, and informed by a range of qualitative modes of inquiry, this study more specifi...

This study offers an ethnographically informed critical interrogation of the spaces and spectacles of `NASCAR Nation'. Informed by a series of open-ended interviews with fans and administrators at NASCAR races, hundreds of hours of participant observation and spatial analysis at these events, and examination of various mediations of NASCAR driver-c...

The study examines the significance of the Confederate flag in the local sport cultures of the American South. Building on a growing body of research related to sport, Whiteness, and the formation of local identity, this article questions how and why the Confederate signifier remains a contested, yet meaningful, symbol in the spaces and spectacles...