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(Re-)presenting the Paralympics: Affective nationalism and the “able-disabled”
journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-17, 11:55 authored by Emma PullenEmma Pullen, Daniel Jackson, Michael SilkThe relationship between media, sport, nations, and nationalism is well established; yet, there is an absence of these discussions at the intersection of communication, Paralympics, and disability studies. This omission is particularly significant considering the rapid commodification of the Paralympic spectacle, exacerbated by the entry of Channel 4 (C4) as the UK Paralympic rights holders, that has seen the games become an important site of disability (re-)presentation. In this article, we focus on the construction of national, normative, disabled bodies in Paralympic representation drawn from an analysis of three integrated data sets from C4’s broadcasting of the Rio 2016 Paralympics: interviews with C4 production and editorial staff, quantitative content analysis, and qualitative moving image analysis. We highlight the strategic approach taken by C4 to focus on successful medal-winning athletes, the implications this has on the sports and disability classifications given media coverage, and the role of affective high-value production practices. We also reveal the commercial tensions and editorial decisions that broadcasters face with respect to which disabilities/bodies are made hypervisible—and thereby those which are marginalized—as national disability sport icons that inculcate preferred notions of disability and the (re-)imagined nation.
Funding
Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant reference number AH/P003842/1)
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Communication and SportVolume
8Issue
6Pages
715 - 737Citation
PULLEN, E., JACKSON, D. and SILK, M., 2020. (Re-)presenting the Paralympics: Affective nationalism and the “able-disabled”. Communication and Sport, 8 (6), pp.715-737.Publisher
SAGE Publications © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2019-03-18Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Communication and Sport and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479519837549.ISSN
2167-4795eISSN
2167-4809Publisher version
Language
- en