Pride, Prejudice, Power & Race in Cricket

A special ARC-APFRN Festival on "Pride, Prejudice, Power & Race in Cricket" will be held in Adelaide on 26-27 November prior to the 2008 Signature Event.  For more information, please click on the following links:
Schedule
Organisers
Power Plays Brief

Schedule

Wednesday 26 November 2008
At Bradley Room, Hawke Centre, University South Australia, off North Terrace near West Terrace – see   http://www.unisa.edu.au/about/campuses/cwmap.asp

• 11. 00- 12.20: SEMINARS ONE    
  Michael Roberts: Bomb Scares: Parochialness and Paranoia in the Cricket World
  Ian Hall: The Changing Power Politics of Cricketing Diplomacy
    
• 12.40-2.00:  KEYNOTE TALK I (bring sandwich lunch if you wish)
  Gideon Haigh: Who’s afraid of the Big, Bad Indian? A Consideration of International Cricket in a Unipolar Age
  
  
• 4.30-5.50: KEYNOTE TALK II
  Boria Majumdar: The Indian Juggernaut: IPL and its Aftermath
  

Thursday, 27 November 2008
Room GK 515, University South Australia, off North Terrace near West Terrace

• 9. 30- 10.50: SEMINARS TWO
  Bernard Whimpress: Pride in Australian Test Cricket
  Chris Speldewinde: Cricket as a Bridge in the Sri Lankan Cricket World?
   
• 11.20-12.40: SEMINARS THREE
  Jenny Thompson: TBA [An Englishwoman’s Perspective on Cricket: English & Aussie Ways]                                                                                                     
  Neville Turner:  Harbhajan Singh, the ICC Code of Conduct and the Rule of Law
  
  
• 1.30-2.50: KEYNOTE TALK III
  Huw Richards: “Not the Same Thing”: Cricket and Conceptions of “Englishness”
  

Thursday, 27 November 2008
Room 102, Napier Bldg, Uni of Adelaide off North terrace and near Bonython Hall

• 6.00-8.00: FORUM on POWER PLAYS IN CRICKET chaired by Bernard Whimpress and confronting Boria Majumdar, Gideon Haigh and Ashley Mallett with contemporary issues in cricket. [top]

Organisers

Chief Organiser: Michael Roberts, Anthropology, University of Adelaide  
Others on Committee:
Prof. Rick Hosking,, English, Flinders University
Dr. Bernard Whimpress Curator, Bradman museum, Adelaide Oval
Tejaswini Patil Vishwanath, PhD Student, UniSa

• Gideon Haigh is a Melbourne journalist, writer and historian. The author and editor of 25 books, he writes chiefly about cricket, business and social issues, and is a regular contributor to The Monthly. His most acclaimed work is Mystery Spinner, a biography of Australian spin bowler Jack Iverson.
  
  
• Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes Scholar, is a Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia since 2006 where he was previously a Distinguished Visiting Fellow. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago since 2003 and at the University of Toronto since 2006 and is a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum at Lausanne, Switzerland. A well-known media figure, he has made television programmes for Times Now, Ten Sports, ESPN, NDTV and has written books on the history and politics of cricket in India and across the world. He serves as the Executive Academic Editor of the journals Soccer & Society and Sport in Society, Deputy Executive Academic Editor of The International Journal of the History of Sport and General Editor of the Routledge Series, Sport in the Global Society.
  
  
• Huw Richards is a London-based writer and researcher specialising in sport, education and politics. Cricket correspondent for the International Herald Tribune since 1999. Rugby correspondent, Financial Times, since 1995. Visiting Researcher, International Centre for Sport History and Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester. 
  
  
• Ashley Mallett played Test cricket for Australia and is a coach as well as journalist. He has authored several books, including The Doug Walters Story (2007) and The Clarrie Grimmett Biography.
  Bernard Whimpress is an Adelaide historian. He has written and edited 14 books on sport, mainly cricket. His most important work is Passport to Nowhere, a history of Aborigines in cricket in the Protection era.
  
  
• Michael Roberts is a Sri Lankan Australian whose expertise straddles history, politics and anthropology. Apart from several books in these fields, he is the main hand behind the anthology Essaying Cricket. Sri Lanka and Beyond (2006).
  
  
• Richard Hosking teaches English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University.  He has been chair of the Adelaide Writers' Week Advisory Committee. He decided to give cricket away when, in his mid forties and playing for Ironbank, he was called upon to face up to a bowler who had once opened for South Australia. While he did not see a single ball on that day, at least he did not get out.
  
  
• Tejaswini Patil Vishwanath is a postgraduate student at Uni SA working on a comparative study of the Cronulla riot and communal riots in Gujarat. [top]

 

Power Plays Brief

Forum on POWER PLAYS IN CRICKET

Australia has dominated world cricket on the field since 1995. Its players have displayed superb skills during the modern era but critics sometimes feel the team plays too hard. ‘Mental disintegration’ was a term coined by Steve Waugh to describe the psychological advantage the Australians sought to establish over opponents. Racial issues have been raised at various times.

The economic power in cricket underwent a tectonic shift to the Indian sub-continent following the World Cup of 1996. The repercussions have been the proliferation of one-day competitions and the greater commercialisation of the game which affects not only its form but the manner of play. Corruption cast a shadow over cricket during the early 2000s and the IPL and its successors threatens to split the game as players and administrators sell out to the highest bidder. Cricket’s morality has been questioned so that its spirit has needed to be formalised in the Laws of the game. At the same time nearly all Test-playing countries have appointed Australian coaches in recent years showing that for better or for worse other cricket nations are following the Australian way.

In setting up a Forum involving Boria Majumdar and two others in panel session under the chairmanship of Bernard Whimpress, the public in Adelaide will be provided with an opportunity to listen to analytical perspectives on these developments. In what is clearly a pun on a recent technical phrase deployed in ODI cricket, the panellists will also be encouraged to review the struggle for dominance in world cricket as well as the implications flowing from the increased professionalization of the game and the inputs of science & technology in sharpening the fitness of players as well as the analysis of themselves & opponents. [top]