Net effects: nationalist-capitalist hegemony in the hip hop-basketball paradigm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I investigate the sociocultural, political, and economic implications of basketball’s soundscape across various “arenas”—both real and imagined. I begin by examining media representations of the sport in contemporary and historical movies and music before shifting focus to how music and sound help shape performance events associated with the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club. Central to the analysis is the hip hop-basketball paradigm, through which I argue that basketball’s soundscape works to uphold a nationalist-capitalist hegemony. Introducing a methodological approach I call just listening, which emphasizes both intensely focused and ethically grounded listening practices, this thesis integrates ideas from the critical study of music, sound, and sport; sound studies and acoustic ecology; performance studies and its precursors; and theories of musical experience and phenomenological ethnomusicology to highlight how basketball’s aural dimensions—its characters, contexts, and contents—are shaped by, and respond to, broader sociocultural, political, and economic forces. Framed as a political act, this approach seeks to bridge individual and collective experiences. Through its application, I interrogate how soundscapes impact both situated and large-scale social contexts, offering a way to critique their intended and unintended outcomes—that is their net effects. Analyzing the practices, protocols, techniques and technologies that mediate sound and music, and the meanings, values, and uses ascribed to them by individuals and groups, my work in this thesis examines the meaningful experience of basketball’s soundscape, gleaning insights from ethnographic work with key stakeholders in Toronto’s professional basketball community, such as artists, fans, technicians, executives, and members of the media. Drawing on participant observation conducted in Toronto from 2018–2023, this thesis highlights the interplay between culture and commerce, examining how basketball’s acoustic environment helps cultivate individual and collective identity and mediate broader sociocultural, political, and economic ideas.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".