Robert E. Rinehart

• PhD in Kinesiology
• Adjunct Associate Professor at Lincoln University

Sport is steeped in nation-based contests, nationalistic displays and potentially aligns specific teams to a sense of national identity, character and prosperity. More often than not, these associations are linked to teams that can claim to represent the nation pitted against another nation as occurs during international sporting fixtures or specif...

Often international sport can be viewed through a nationalistic lens, with sport allowing for nation-based team selections and competitions. Alternatively, we probe the notion of pseudo-nationalism in a New Zealand setting to examine two professional teams that, falsely, evoke familiar symbols and linkages to the nation. The first is ‘Team New Zeal...

"This chapter is an exploration of the concepts of bordering, margins, power relationship--among and between nation-states, communities, factions, cults, groups of people, and individuals, even on a cellular level. It is meant as an opening up and flowering of our ideas of how living things create community and possibility, or wallow in greed, sepa...

"Immigrants, migrants, displaced, and diasporas persons: all have been constrained or enabled by borders of some sort. This book explores international cases of how and why such boundaries come to be; who is affected by socially constructed borders; what it means to individuals and nation-states to recognise and deal with arbitrary divisions; and f...

Creating inclusive, user-friendly spaces is a perennial challenge confronting sports and facilities attempting to open their doors to the community while essentially servicing elite sports programmes. We aim to probe tensions underpinning the co-habitation of elite and community sports in a New Zealand setting and assumed utopian visions of navigat...

The avant-garde has much to offer sport studies and many paths to explore for sport studies’ scholars. In this article, I makes a case for the use of the avant-garde as a metaphor for sport studies, sport scholars, and the public at large. To do this, I sketch out some of the foundational and pertinent characteristics of the avant-garde, provides e...

Creating inclusiveness and user-friendly spaces is a challenge to any new sporting venue. This article explores the attempts by various ‘stakeholders’ involved in the production of the Avantidrome, New Zealand's ‘Home of Cycling’ to align the rhetorics with the realities for creating a new velodrome across its first 20 months of operation. More spe...

Proem For this special issue of The Ethnographic Edge, titled ‘TheEthnographer/Poet: Breaching the Humanities/Science Duality,’the remit for the call for papers was quite broad: "The call . . . include[s] 'think' pieces about the direction(s) of poetry and poetic sensibility within research paradigms, poetic-influenced ethnographies, and ethnogra...

In this piece, I explore two related issues of new critical Indigenous research. First, building on previous work, I recap the similarities and differences—in terms of social justice issues—of two historical cases regarding Indigenous peoples: Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Navajo in the United States. I then examine the role of respect—especial...

Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo Journalism” arguably brought a new style to popular and populist writing. In this piece, I emulate some of his style to show how it felt to attend a sports extravaganza, The X Games, in 1997. I mirror some of the sensory aspects of being a spectator at these games, and offer some insights on how alternative/extreme/lifes...

In this paper, we explore the extent to which political cartoons and comic strips (as mediated public and political visual art, the ninth art (cf., Groensteen, 2007[1999])) subvert/confirm institutional values of so-called Western democracies during times of war. Our concern—as sociologists of sport—is with the ways dominant sporting sensibilities...

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event....

In this paper, we explore the extent to which political cartoons and comic strips (as mediated public and political visual art, the ninth art (cf., Groensteen, 2007[1999])) subvert/confirm institutional values of so-called Western democracies during times of war. Our concern—as sociologists of sport—is with the ways dominant sporting sensibilities...

On November 9, 2015, the president and chancellor at the University of Missouri resigned in response to protests and threat of the football team’s boycott (Svrluga, 2015). The unrest and racial disharmony that surfaced at Mizzou had been building for years and, in fact, has been evidenced since on many other campuses across the United States (Gross...

This chapter acknowledges the significant contributions of early action sport scholars, and their ongoing influence on current thinking about the experiences of women as participants. With their work spanning a number of sports, Becky Beal, Douglas Booth, Jason Laurendeau, Catherine Palmer, Robert Rinehart and Belinda Wheaton, were amongst those wh...

Three poems, centred on Trump's tenure as president.

In this piece, I explore the similarities and differences—in terms of social justice issues—of two historical cases regarding Indigenous peoples: Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand and Navajo in the United States. I look at the foundational documents of the Treaty of Waitangi and the Navajo Treaty of 1868 and explore how they have been enacted in these...

In this paper, I discuss the concepts of neoliberalism and audit culture, and how they affect teaching culture. Moreover, I propose a form of goal setting that, if used properly, will hopefully work to combat some of the more onerous aspects of neoliberalism and audit clture in education

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies. Design/methodology/approach – The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture. Findings – The...

Ngā mihi mahana kia koutou. Kō Holly Thorpe tāku ingoa. Ngā te whare Wānanga o Waikato ahau. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Good afternoon, and welcome all. My name is Holly Thorpe, and I’m honoured to be moderating this keynote panel today.

When we first discussed this book, it was a humid, coastal day. It was the kind of day in Whaingaroa/Raglan, Aotearoa/New Zealand that was sure to go one of two ways: either pouring with rain, or bright, woozy and sunny. The wet heat pressed in on us, like a smelly woolen dog.

Both an introduction to sensory ethnography and a bold display of the sophisticated use of the sensory for contemporary ethnography, Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses reflects both indigenous and non-mainstream takes on the sensory and the sensual in ethnographic practice. The authors provide a collection of original and timely chapter...

Media shifts in the past 50 years based on a late capitalist economics have profoundly affected how a film is produced, delivered, and received. In this article, I aim to examine two exemplar surf films—The Endless Summer (1964) and Slow Dance (2013)—as well as the surf film genre to note some of the ways these cultural artifacts have changed over...

This innovative text's critical examination foregrounds the prime reason why so many people participate in or watch sport - pleasure. Although there has been a "turn" to emotions and affect within academia over the last two decades, it has been somewhat remiss that pleasure, as an integral aspect of human life, has not received greater attention fr...

L’incapacité contemporaine d’éprouver du plaisir est concomitante à la ruée vers des expériences médiatisées comme expériences de plaisir qui sont expérimentées rapidement et de façon épisodique. Cela constitue une facette très importante de la nature paradoxale de la manière dont nos contemporains organisent leur vie. Les sports alternatifs, les s...

With the perception of more time and disposable income for many “first world” nationals, sports and physical activities, in early 21st Century global culture, have become structured, surveilled, and significant modes of personal expression. Both spectators and participants have (both consciously and unconsciously) begun to question and celebrate ma...

Reliquaries are forms for remembrance, but they are also enactments, processes of just that remembering. In this piece, through five exemplar poems, I examine “reliquary” as noun and “reliquary” as verb.

This proem to the book Ethnographic Worldviews: Transformations and Social Justice serves to locate the collection in contemporary spaces of involved and committed practitioners of the ethnographic craft. While discussing the cutting-edge exemplars within this book, the co-editors present a global picture of the ethnographic craft-and art-that swee...

In April 1971, the Chinese government extended an invitation to the U.S. Men’s Table Tennis team to tour China for a "friendly" tournament. Many observers at the time believed that this so-called “Ping Pong Diplomacy” was the beginning of China’s return to full engagement in international politics as well as an improvement in Sino-American relation...

Cartoons can be found in a range of public art including political satire, graphica and graffiti. Generally relying on caricature, the cartoon has a long history of reflecting a spirit of the times and orienting the viewer. Through a few often simple, but precisely-directed strokes, a cartoon can capture a depth of meaning that may evoke a range of...

Sport nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have flourished in the contemporary moment, particularly situated within neoliberal global politics. In this article we focus on the relatively recent proliferation of action sport-based social justice advocacy groups. Drawing on extant materials from our ongoing research on two action sport-related social...

It's an ebook available inexpensively on-line. For example: http://www.amazon.com/Inline-skating-contemporary-Robert-Rinehart-ebook/dp/B00DE2FI58

Rarely are we invited to know the where of a writer’s writing; not the stance or angle or point of view they take on their narrative, but rather, the physical space and time they occupy as they write. This, of course, is an integral facet of the writer’s craft – and perhaps art. Writers (or in this case, ethnographers) may write “winter wonderland”...

This piece is about remembrance and forgetting; about shame and forgiveness; about capitalist media and the victimization of vulnerable citizens.

In this article introducing the special issue, I argue for ethnographic research and research traditions that are simultaneously global and local, that are universal and singular, that are a mish-mash of cultural and individual negotiations. Further, in this piece, I locate a Performative Ethnography that is both vital and thriving, and offer as ex...

Using techniques gleaned from Mienczakowski (1995), Denzin (2003), and Saldana (2005), this presentation will work to involve the audience in a co-performance of peace/conflict resolution. There will be a short introductory, and scripts given out to members of the audience, to perform a type of “reader’s theatre” in which several scenarios are begu...

This paper is our concerned response to the tendency in critical studies of physical culture and alternative sport to reduce experience to language, discourse, texts or representation. We consider the potential of British social theorist and cultural-geographer Nigel Thrift's 'non-representational theory' for shedding new light on the lived, affect...

In the academy that we often call the “sociology of sport,” rarely do we allow for the existence of poets or even of poetic sensibilities. This may seem to be a strange comment, given that NASSS particularly, and the sociology of sport more generally, are seen as stemming from a proud and mostly-honored tradition of the “social sciences.” In this c...

This paper frames, and creates, a fictionalized two-act play based upon two real yet imagined contexts: 1) 1975, apartheid-era South Africa (involving cricket, Yacoob Omar—who was one of South Africa's premier Black cricketers during apartheid, other 1970s-era cricketers, and a fabricated scenario), and 2) a 1995, “post-apartheid” South Africa (inv...

Using the "voices" of the "creators" of intertextualized sport, this article will demonstrate how sport is inextricably linked with performance. As well, an exegesis of the modernist and postmodernist frameworks of contemporary sport will show how many sports have evolved from grass roots to Goffman’s "framed" responses to the cult of celebrity and...

A growing body of literature has focused on how sport organizations might manage diversity in the workforce (Cunningham, 2007a; Cunningham, 2007b; Cunningham & Sagas, 2004; Doherty & Chelladurai, 1999; Fink, Pastore, & Riemer, 2001). Another growing body of research has begun to examine sport marketers’ efforts to reach a more diverse fan/spectator...

In the "Age of Trump," when truth claims, academic records, and hyperbolic statements have become somewhat normalised, public explanations for such public "lying" may be highly relevant. The “Eddie Scissons Syndrome,” a term coined by fiction writer W. P. Kinsella, describes a phenomenon wherein people exaggerate their personal histories for their...

According to Paton, sport management research went through several phases up to the 1990s: a praxis phase, based upon "administrative principles, usually developed by authorities in the field, and upon program planning in physical education"; a second more theory-based phase that continues to the present; and a third descriptive phase (Paton, 1987,...

The proliferation of action or extreme sports in recent years leads to a reassessment of fundamental, foundational questions regarding the nature of sport. One such question is Does the much-vaunted alternative ethos of action sports lead to a concomitant paradigm shift in fundamental attitudes toward race, class, or gender differences within these...

This study is part of a larger ethnographic project which examines human rights issues in youth figure skating, from both the skaters’ and the adults’ points of view. As in many first world, westernized sports available to youth participants in the late 20th/early 21st century, parental involvement and support is necessary for viable participation...

This study is part of a larger ethnographic project which examines human rights issues in youth figure skating, from both the skaters’ and the adults’ points of view. As in many first world, westernized sports available to youth participants in the late 20th/early 21st century, parental involvement and support is necessary for viable participation...

An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes and scholars like the late Jake Burton, Arlo Eisenberg, Kirsten Kremer, and Becky Beal look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two...

"Since the [X] Games, we're already seeing aggressive skating more in the public eye. I don't know if that's good or bad. It has created a whole professional class of rock-starlike people.".

The relatively recent growth of so-called Extreme Sports has created an opportunity for scholars to examine sport, games, and play once again - but as the concepts are played out in emerging sport forms. In this ethnography of BMX bikers, we examine one group of youth within two different venues: the grass-roots, child-driven activity of setting up...

Despite an ever-increasing number of alternative sports which have begun encroaching into mainstream sport, the process of commodification of such alternative sports has been little examined. In this article, the author will explore some of the dynamic relationships—the establishment of a “pecking order”—occurring in skateboarding and in-line skati...

With recent calls for new, often radical and experimental ways of "doing" ethnographic writing (e.g., Denzin, Ellis & Bochner, Harrington, Richardson), the responsibility of ethnographers to write convincingly comes to the fore. In this article, the author explores the use, worldview, and evaluation of writing that stems from a humanistic tradition...

Written for an advanced, knowledgeable, sociologist audience, this critique of sport and games may be a difficult read for many people. Using the language of postmodernism, with its attitude of superiority, Rinehart seeks to show that in contemporary sport contests the audience and media are also players. He advances the thesis of sport as an avant...