Football in the Hands of the Other: Qatar's World Cup in the British Broadsheet Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using reportage of the 2022 World Cup taken from The Telegraph and The Guardian , this paper demonstrates how Bhaba's ‘dynamics of writing and textuality’ are implemented to represent an Orientalist discourse that describes Qatar in colonial terms. Citing work by cultural critics such as Edward Said and Stuart Hall, it is argued that the British media constructs such a discourse to re-assert a form of colonial dominance which has historically greatly benefitted the former. Adapting theoretical frameworks on ‘grammars of exchange’ by Said and on mimicry by Homi Bhaba, it is contended that the British media's dominance allows it to replicate the process of knowledge formation that enabled colonial discourse to thrive throughout the 19 th century, and that Qatar's success in mimicking many of the cultural attributes of the West has transformed it into a viable threat which must be controlled. The paper concludes by arguing that the cultural narrative of Qatar conveyed to global audiences by the British media is a Western invention. It insists that such homogenising, Eurocentric narratives represent an ideological agenda with little relevance to the actual culture of Qatar and their exposure challenges the reductive hierarchies of neo-colonial racism that they promote.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".