The Symbolic Politics of Sport Mega-Events: 2010 in Comparative Perspective
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For ambitious civic and national boosts sport mega-events provide unique opportunities for the pursuit of symbolic politics—a chance to signal important changes of direction, reframe dominant narratives about the host, and/or reinforce key messages of change. These signals or narratives are critical vehicles of legitimation, with both narrowly instrumental objectives and more expansive purposes related to the mobilisation of societal support for certain dominant ‘ideas of the state’. This paper explores the realm of symbolic politics through a comparative analysis of three disparate mega-event hosts which will take the world stage in 2010: South Africa (the FIFA World Cup), Delhi/India (the Commonwealth Games), and Vancouver/Canada (the Winter Olympics). The paper argues that despite important differences in the circumstances of these hosts and the events they are to mount, there are some key commonalities in the narratives they seek to deploy and the subtexts they embody. These commonalities revolve around a paradoxical blending of inclusive, transcendent, or cosmopolitan narratives on the one hand, and competitive, differentiating narratives of ‘world class’ aspirations and achievements, on the other. Strikingly then, these widely dispersed events have become vehicles for similar messages with potentially contradictory implications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it