Breaking new ground, records, and norms, the Swedish discus throw champion and cultural chameleon Ricky Bruch (1946–2011) had a multi-faceted career and lived an illustrious life. He acted in both children’s movies and explicitly adult ones; he recorded songs, wrote poetry, and joined a populist party. Other than that, he was constantly up in arms about the governance of and funding from sport federations. The aim of the article is to flesh out and assemble the various actions and expressions of this protean figure into a coherent picture. Bruch’s early athletic career was characterised by success and the continuous breaking of records, both due to meticulous planning and training, as well as to systematic doping. His later attempts at reaching the international elite were wrought with frustration and failure. We scrutinize Bruch as an outsider in view of Bruno Latour’s conception of modernity as a project to separate nature and culture, a project which, however, produces hybridities – one of which is Bruch himself. By sorting out the differing outputs of athleticism, poetry, biography, acting, songs, and the outspokenness in interviews, the present essay argues that Bruch’s provocation and appeal, i.e. his ‘outsiderness’, are to be found in the way he makes the works of the moderns explicit all at once (albeit distributed over a whole life). © 2025 the Author(s). 

Many James Bond films have frequented the Caribbean islands and other archipelagos throughout their run. This paper aims to delve into the epistemological implications of the secret agent’s travels and movements in epic fashion. The study applies theories of archipelagic and abyssal thinking in Édouard Glissant, as well as the significance of ideas about the abyssal and dynamic features of thought in German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. Bond is viewed as a mythopoetic character in the making of his own epic, comparable with Odysseus, both gaining knowledge from their travels and exploits and forming patterns of thought through their movements. We ask, how does thinking evolve and how is it applied when epic heroes arch their way through hardships during the adventure of their grand tours?

Famously, Ian Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels and novellas on his estate in Jamaica, and he set several of the stories on the island. In comparison, the film series began its adventures in Jamaica, in Dr. No, but did not return until what was proven to be the final EON production, No Time to Die, where Daniel Craig made something of a show of returning to the Fleming-esque idyll as a retreat from service, before his final and fatal adventure. Nevertheless, many Bond films have frequented the Caribbean islands throughout their run, as if displacing the Jamaican point of origin and scattering it in a nomadic distribution across the archipelago. This symbolizes a problematic relationship with traditional hierarchy, both challenged and maintained, in relation to the legacy of the imperial mainland – both the UK and the USA, as powers of production (increasingly problematic). 

This paper aims to delve into this ambiguous state of affairs by associating the secret agent with the “archipelagic” and “abyssal” thinking of Édouard Glissant, a postcolonial geopoetics and geophilosophy to challenge “continental” imperialist thought, in an attempt to problematize the significance of the apparent escapism of the Bond mythos. Significantly, this mythos also reveals Bond’s affinity with another secretive and cunning archipelagic figure: Odysseus. The Caribbean métissage (mixing of races) would therefore be conflated with the Odyssean polymêtis (thinking as ruse) as conjoining, hybridizing strategies to understand the destiny of James Bond as a transformative, mythopoetic character of significant importance to thinking critically the conditions of thought and action in the presumed post-colonial and post-Cold War era, but also problematizing the contemporary paradox of neo-imperialist globality and hyper-nationalist insularity. 

This paper concerns the judgement and critique of athletic movement in moving images. Inspired by the ski crash trial case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, and by comparing different media representations of downhill skiing, the essay outlines a framework that discerns as well as connects elements of movement and images, developing the concept of the ‘diorama’ in relation to Deleuze’s notion of the diagram and Kant’s idea of critique. Thus, moving images featuring elite alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, fictional character James Bond, and an official skiing game for the international ski federation (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS) figure as comparative material to the animation that played a central role in the celebrity trial. Diorama and diagram are posited on a continuum to assess when and how judgement takes place in each of the exhibits. The essay concludes by discussing how the judging of athletic movement in moving images contributed to Paltrow winning the case, and theoretically by connecting this finding to dioramas and diagrams as tools apt for a framework aiming at the critique of athletic movement in moving images. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

How fares the sociology of sport? How can it continue to make sense to and of its object of study and knowledge? By introducing the philosopher Roy Bhaskar as a viable option for critical scholars of sport, Graham Scambler grapples with those questions in his A critical realist theory of sports. © Kalle Jonasson 2024

In “Postscript on Societies of Control”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proclaimed that “Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports”. By this, he alluded to Foucault’s thoughts on older societal regimes and power diagrams of sovereignty and discipline, and that now such models have been supplemented with governance through control and allegations of increased freedom. This article has as its point of departure the potential of sports to reflect social change. Contemporaneously to the coining of Deleuze’s surfing sentence, a new sport emerges: parkour, in which practitioners “surf” the urban realm. This practice gained attention globally when it was featured in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. The analysis in this article revolves around the different ways of moving in and through the environment in the renowned parkour chase in the beginning of the movie. How do different kinds of displacement in the parkour chase of Casino Royale relate to the transition between the societies described by Deleuze, and what new adaptations emerge and what old logics and models return? It is concluded that the older forms of power prevail and that the ideal of the society of control cannot be realised.

Digital tools in preschool teaching are often presented as something threatening in the public debate, often in relation to health risks, such as sedentary behaviour. This article finds new ways to discuss this through an investigation of what conditions the use of mobile documentation technology in relation to both storytelling and movement in preschool education. We discuss how the physical and the digital can relate to each other in preschool teaching. With a particular focus on bodily aspects and storytelling, we explore new ways of approaching children’s perspectives with a point of departure in mobile digital documentation. Based on data material consisting of children's documentation of their immediate environment with the help of action cameras (that is, small digital film cameras that are applied to the body with the help of a helmet or harness). The bodily, pedagogical, and ethical consequences of combining the physical and the digital in preschool education are discussed. The data is analyzed with inspiration from a social anthropological perspective with a focus on the epistemological couplet emic/etic. The analyzes are characterized by what could be called an "epic" approach to the child filming and to each other during their movements in the surroundings of the preschool. The study offers an example of how movement can be staged in preschool education. To this end, the combination of physical and digital elements is deemed to be meritorious.