Rinehart provides an overview of key tensions that impact ageing and lifestyle sports in late capitalism. Rinehart addresses the tension between avant-garde and mainstream values, the tension between different generational cohorts, as well as the tension between the current cultural zeitgeist of individual agency and self-control and the inevitable process of ageing.

We know that the lifespan of a human being is but a dot on eternity. Despite this fact, there are some lives who, by their very existence, have generated a better world, a curiosity that is gentle and nonobtrusive, welcoming, and generous. As Walter Pater (1873) wrote, "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" (p. 1326). These lives, coming into being, may, through their relationship with others, with the physical world, with the world of ideas, create pathways on which others following may flourish. Such a hard, gemlike life, I posit respectfully, is the life of Norman Denzin. As an invited offering for this Festschrift in celebration of the intellectual genius, the caring impact, the kind and generous humanity of NKD, this piece draws upon the effect(s) his career and example have had upon my immediate circle of scholars as well as upon academia writ large. As an aspect of his unfailing curiosity and humility, Norman has shown us - characteristically, not told, but shown - what it means to celebrate life when, after all, as Raymond Carver so famously put it, it's "all gravy" (1989, p. 118).

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 exemplars from art, considers the similarities between sport and art (in terms of an avant-garde metaphor), and provides some exemplars from sport.

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 Zealand’, which races in the global America’s Cup yachting series but overtly manufactures nationalistic links between the corporate sport, syndicate and nation. The second is the ‘New Zealand’ Warriors which operates as a professional franchise in the Australian-based National Rugby League competition against 15 other Australian clubs. Despite their corporate structures, as well as circulation in non-nation-based sporting contests, both teams exhibit forms of pseudo-nationalism by conflating, obfuscating and masquerading as nationally-representative sports teams. Collectively, both teams proffer a contested vision of pseudo-nationalism by mimicking other national sport teams while projecting, evoking and imploring an allegiance to ‘New Zealandness’.

This chapter draws upon a globalised and localised sense of a Reaganomic/Thatcherism/Rogernomics type of neoliberalism purchased by the New Right from the 1980s onwards. After a brief discussion of neoliberalism and its precepts, we illustrate the specific ramifications on New Zealand sport by discussing several short cases: (1) the advent of a hegemonic “professional” model for New Zealand Rugby; (2) the instigation of public-private “partnerships” for the creation of funded stadia and venues; (3) the lure of attracting and staging mega-events.

Advocating for the use of poetry within education – and, concomitantly, educational research – is sensible, especially to a pragmatic mindset. Poetry, and a poetic sensibility, provides opportunities for students. Educational research has the opportunity to mitigate some of the stultifying effects of neoliberal-based educational models, and the overt and covert use of poetry and a poetic sensibility, respectively, are proper tools to accomplish this intervention. To incorporate a poetic sensibility, there exist examples of "criteria" for poetry. A poetic sensibility evokes some of the holistic, process-oriented power of the poetic: its intent is not simply to define, characterize, dissect, vivisect, or otherwise freeze how "groups of people think and feel and behave or even reveal the deep, non-obvious meaning of a group's beliefs and customs To briefly summarize, the poetic sensibility project encompasses research poetry, literary poetry, and epistemological, ontological, and axiological concerns.

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 specifically, there exists a tension in the 'selling' of a sport-for-all model with the public construction of a high-performance, elite-use facility. In neoliberal times, such contradictions seemingly proliferate when public spending blends and blurs with corporate sponsorship and a results-driven framework for funding elite sport while being aligned with visions of community. Combining user interviews and sustained on-site ethnographic observations with Foucault's theories of power, we seek to understand how these multiple entities produced relational forms of power that resulted in efforts to accommodate both community-based and high performance models within the same cycling space.

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 several historical cases regarding Indigenous peoples. I then examine the role of respect—especially “reciprocal respect”—in Pan-Pacific Indigenous research and give exemplars from New Zealand, Filipino, Aboriginal, and Samoan contexts as discussion points that ground a larger examination of mutual respect, mutuality, and cooperative behaviour. Finally, I suggest that the historical treatments of various Indigenous peoples to this day impact upon the form and tenor of critical Indigenous research.

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/lifestyle sports have collided with transnational corporate structures.

In this article, We explore the extent to which political cartoons and comic strips – as mediated public and political visual art, the ‘ninth art’ according to Groensteen’s The System of Comics (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 are (re)presented in cartoon art, and how sport itself is conflated with patriotic ideologies of war as a vehicle for propaganda. In particular, We interrogate how competitive-sporting ideals are aligned with war and conflict, and mobilized by cartoons during periods of Western-asserted conflict. We are intrigued by how some cartoon illustrations have the visual power to misplace, simplify and essentialize – via sporting analogy – the intense and complex emotions surrounding war. The aim of the article is to examine how the visual within popular culture is used to dis-connect and dis-engage a public with the realities of war and human conflict.

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. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

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, 2015). In this article, we use performance ethnography (Denzin, 2003) to demonstrate social activism as enacted by college athletes historically and in recent years. Denzin advocates using performance ethnography as a way to imagine and perform “a society in which differences are honored” (p. xiii). Thus, our resistance can be “shaped by how we read, write, perform, and critique culture” (p. xiii). The authors are graduate students and faculty members who are invested in enacting social justice at our individual colleges and universities.