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.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze repeatedly referred to a wide range of sports and games throughout his career. This article assembles a comprehensive view of the philosophy of sport seen from Deleuze’s perspective. By studying the development of how he discussed different sports and games, and by pinpointing the concepts he constructed with reference to them, the article attests to the merits of a Deleuzian philosophy of sports. His term athleticism is utilised as a node to overview his allusions to sports and games in general. Special attention is paid to sport as a companion to the creative domains of science, philosophy, and art. Thus, it is concluded that what athletes create are moves, which amounts to inventing new styles which may alter the sport and attest to new ways of thinking through bodies in motion. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article revolves around conceptualising temporality and drama, with the example of how the broken time sequestered by Karl Marx’s notion of historical repetition and the struggles relating to this, in his supplement to Hegel, is displayed in James Bond films. A focus of the inquiry is an hauntological analysis (in the Derridean sense) of how the connection between heroism and tragedy in films evokes haunting presences of older versions of Bond, between actors, between films, and within the specific story arcs. While the heroism of Bond is exemplified by his sportive endeavours, time and temporality are understood as repetition, and foremost in relation to the phenomenon of the reboot—a specialty of our protagonist. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with extreme sporting activities. Such sports are often transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasised for stylisations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief, in an oftentimes ironic fashion. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies enacting a sustained heroism emanating from the extreme athletic displays in the agonal theatre of sports.

The aim of this project is to examine the educational dimensions of esport as part of the course syllabi in secondary education. An increasing number of schools on the upper secondary level (in Sweden: gymnasium) are offering three-year programs with an “esport profile” within aesthetics and media. School marketing suggests that esport can work as a bait for potential students who are interested in playing computer games, but the scholastic values of computer gaming remain to be clarified. Whereas “gamification” is an established term for transforming educational (and other formal) practices into game-like activities, little has been said about its counterpart “schoolification”: how originally playful and informal practices are transformed to fit within school curricula and syllabi for achieving academic goals. A number of unanswered questions follow. For example, teachers have observed that students in the esport program are less motivated in schoolwork but are highly motivated gamers. Is this a question of what students learn, or how they learn? How do the students themselves perceive esport performance in relation to academic performance? What are their driving factors and can motivation in one domain transfer to another? How do students perceive fear of failure, gains of winning, competition and success, across esport and traditional school topics? Here, we address the challenges and procedures of setting up a practice-based research program where the practitioners (i.e. students, teachers, an esport coach and school leaders) collaborate with researchers in investigating the relationship between computer gaming and traditional teaching-and-learning activities in the classroom.