In this paper, I use a case study of translation of Korean media golf narratives into English to widen academic discussions on sporting language translation. I employ poststructural and postcolonial theory to analyze historically mediated and translocally grounded Korean golf narratives while elucidating the power relations embedded in these narratives. In my analysis of Korean media representations of women golfers as they are translated into English, I reveal how colonial histories and cultural hierarchies are embedded in sport narratives. The study reveals discursive links between the local and global levels, where global sport is represented in distinct ways depending on local language use even as language moves local sport into a global/transnational context. Finally, this paper invites a rethinking of translation as part of data collection/treatment and data interpretation/analysis using an anticolonial, ethical, and rigorous methodological practice.
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. Our concerns crystallized during the spirited feminist responses to a fiery roundtable debate on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) in New Orleans in November 2012. At that session, one audience member after another spoke to what they saw as the unacknowledged appropriation by PCS proponents of longstanding feminist—and feminist cultural studies—approaches to scholarship and writing. These critiques focused not just on the intellectual moves that PCS scholars claim to be making but on how they are made, with several audience members and some panelists expressing their concerns about the territorializing effects of some strains of PCS discourse.
Thomas Carter's In Foreign Fields offers a novel understanding of sport migrants' transnational experiences as well as insights into the power relations inhering in place-based migratory practices. Within scholarship on globalization and sport labor migration, Carter's book stands in a unique location, theoretically and empirically, making a number of strong contributions to the literature. First, its methodological breadth and depth are unique in the sport migration literature. The book is based on 12 years of observational fieldwork including ethnographic interviews and self-narrated life histories with more than 200 migrants in various sports. In addition, the research participants include not only sport celebrities but also lesser known athletes, their families, and other sport-related laborers. Carter explains the reason for this diverse group of research participants and data sources by arguing that not all sport migrants are athletes, not all migrant athletes are rich celebrities, and migration is rarely an individual act but instead it requires social support (see also Carter's [2011] journal article critiquing the current literature on sport migration). While the predominant data sources in the sport migration literature rely on governing agents and the news media, Carter takes the voices of migrants (according to his expanded definition of sport migrants rather than the more narrow definition typically used in sport migration literature) into account as he describes the process of transnational sport migration. He then rounds out his research design with media sources and interviews that provide social context and analytical detail.This complex methodology gains analytic potency through Carter's anthropological approach to the study of transnational sport migration. For example, he utilizes an anthropological concept of culture that is "both wide-ranging and situated" (p. 9) and, therefore, multiply experienced, moving, and changing rather than fixed. Further, he treats the concepts 'field' and 'fieldwork' as part of the ethnographic enterprise. He perceives fieldwork as momentary encounters that produce partial truths, and he treats transnational migration as varied and heterogeneous. These approaches result in rich explanations throughout this book and provide a distinctive tone to his storytelling.Carter demonstrates the analytic potential of a transnational perspective in studies of sport labor migration. In sport studies literature, the use of transnationalism as theory and methodology has remained, for the most part, at the descriptive level, and the term is often used interchangeably with globalization. While Carter recognizes the contributions of other scholars, he critiques globalization theorists of sport migration who focus on individual agents (often celebrity athletes), noting
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.