SOCI405-12S1 (C) Semester One 2012
Special Topic: Presenting Sports

Description

Do sports speak for themselves? We have become accustomed to a version of televised sports where presenters tell viewers what’s going on and how to interpret the unfolding of events. Despite technological changes to the broadcasting of sports, this presentation of sports has remained a stable part of television programming. Broadcasts of sports events are among the most popular television programmes worldwide and many global media networks have been launched on the back of exclusive broadcasting rights to popular sports events. Research suggests that sport broadcasting is created with the male viewer in mind: the vast majority of programmes feature male sports and are presented by male journalists and commentators/announcers. There is little reason to suggest that this broadcast formula is likely to change, or is there?

This course focuses on the presentation of sport events on television with a particular focus on sport commentating/announcing.  The aim of the course is to develop a critically understanding of presentation of sports on television as one facet of researching sport-media. The course will introduce historical and contemporary debates that highlight the research traditions in the areas of the production, reception and texual analyses of media-sport, debate the strengths and weaknesses of a focus on media-sport as text including different methodological traditions, compare content analysis, narrative analysis and discourse analysis as methods for unpacking commentator/announcer narratives and practices; situate the television production of sports events within a national and global contexts and within broader discourses of bodies, gender and ethnicity.

Learning Outcomes

The aim of this course is to explore arguments about how to understand sport-media and to assist students in developing skills in the following areas:

• critical understandings of arguments about media-sports;
• critical understandings of key theoretical and methodological debates in media-sport research;
• development of detailed knowledge about analysing media-sport presentations;
• development of practical skills in handling data;
• development of own research question and methodological strategies to explore research question;
• systematic analysis and presentation of findings in relation to own research question;
• development and undertaking of class-lead or own research project.

Pre-requisites

Restrictions

Equivalent Courses

For further information see School of Social and Political Sciences.