Protesting the Olympics: anti-Olympics movements and Berlin’s bid for the 2000 summer Olympics
The deadline for 2012 Doctoral College Studentships has now passed.
The Brighton Doctoral College is pleased to welcome applications from self-funded or externally sponsored students for programmes of research in this or a closely related area, beginning from September 2012. Applications are welcome from students wishing to study full time or part time, and applications are welcome from students in employment who have the support of their employers.
- Based in the Faculty of Education and Sport
- Supervisors: Professor Alan Tomlinson; Dr Thomas F. Carter.
Application deadline
The university cannot guarantee that students can start at their requested date unless deadlines are met.
- UK/EU students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 August, for January entry it is the 1 November and for May it is the 1 March.
- International students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 June, for January entry it is the 1 September and for May it is the 1 January.
The Olympic Games - the summer Olympics in particular - have prospered in the period following the transformed political economy of the games in the mid-1980s, particularly in the wake of the commercial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games; revenue income of the IOC has risen astronomically, and cities and countries continue to bid to stage the event (Tomlinson, 2012).
In February 2012, though, Rome pulled out of the process in the light of the deepening economic crisis of the country. This project will illuminate the processes that have led other cities to draw back from bidding for the Games in the modern period, contributing a hidden contemporary history of the bidding process exploring neglected dimensions of successful anti-mega event movements (Boykoff, 2011; Lenskyj, 2000). It will focus upon a particular case, that of Berlin’s bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, in the light of the millennium moment and a decade of German reunification since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The project will be rooted in the documentary resources in the ‘Berlin Olympic Bid’ collection in the Centre for Sport Research, acquired in the late 1990s from storage in Berlin, where it had been concealed from state authorities. The collection comprises official IOC documents, state documents and papers, and material on the motives and strategies of those who opposed the bid, constituting a unique resource for analysis of anti-Olympic initiatives. Overviewing anti-Olympics movements, with the 1990s German story as a centrepiece, the project comprises a wholly original contribution to contemporary Olympic history and sport studies, and the politics of the urban sporting spectacle (Carter, 2011). A strong capacity for reading German is crucial for this project. The research will advance further Brighton’s world-leading investigative work into sport cultures, institutions, and governance.
The supervisory team consists of Professor Alan Tomlinson, whose critical interpretive work has been prominent in Olympic scholarship since the mid-1980s, and Dr Thomas Carter, an award-winning anthropologist with an interest in urban movements and social protest.
References:
Boykoff, J. (2011), ‘The anti-Olympics’, New Left Review 67 (January/February): 41-59.
Carter, T.F. (2011) ‘Interrogating athletic urbanism: On examining the politics of the city underpinning the production of the spectacle’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 46/2: 131-139.
Lenjsky, H. (2000), Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics and Activism, New York: New York University Press.
Tomlinson, A. (2012) ‘The making – and unmaking? – of the Olympic corporate class’, in H. Lenskyj and S. Wagg (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 233-247.
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