The Butler Scholarly Journal is the college’s platform for exploring the topics and issues that interest you. Engaging with debates beyond our degrees provides important and rewarding experiences and the BSJ aims to showcase students’ academic articles.
To find out more about writing or editing for the BSJ, contact the editor: kiran.kaur@durham.ac.uk and take a look at the website, where articles are published termly: http://butlerscholarlyjournal.com/
Olympic Legacies: Culture vs. Sport
Kiran Kaur explores the legacies produced by the Olympics for Butler Scholarly Journal.
The notion of an ‘Olympic Legacy’ is often invoked to reiterate the longevity and importance of the global sporting event. The prestige of the games and celebrity of the athletes lodge in the imagination of the audience, promising a summer of sporting celebration that will aim to inspire a new generation of athletes and encourage even the laziest of us to take up a new sport. However, whilst sport seems the most obvious of Olympic legacies, it would seem that in the long term, cultural projects running alongside the Olympic Games provide another layer of continuity. In fact cultural legacies have the potential to be more lucrative and therefore the more enduring.
The Olympic Games: A matter of commercialization and (over) conformity?
With the Rio 2016 Olympic Games now just months away, Lewis Wright explores who will benefit from the Games and whether we can trust the athletes who compete, for Butler Scholarly Journal.
Sport has never been more popular. As a result, there has never been such a desire among multi-million pound companies and enterprises to claim a stake in what was once seen as a simple pastime that could enhance one’s health and well-being on a physical, psychological, and social level. Subsequently, the extrinsic benefit from sporting success has never been greater.
Sport: A Tool of Colonial Control for the British Empire
Isobel Roser discusses Britain’s historic use of sport as a means of colonial control for Butler Scholarly Journal.
Sport, as we know it, found its roots in the British Empire. Many of today’s most popular sports including cricket, football and tennis, were organised and codified by the British in the nineteenth century.[1] However, assessing the motivations behind this vast programme of sporting dissemination still remains relatively under-explored.
Beyond the Olympic Spectacle: Displacement for Development
Amy Batley tells Butler Scholarly Journal about her findings with regard to the controversial displacement of Rio’s urban poor in the run up to the Olympic Games.
As the first South American host, the 2016 Olympics in Rio are eagerly anticipated as an opportunity to attract tourists and business, as well as providing employment and training to assist the city’s economic growth. However, beyond the spectacle and perceived benefits of the event lies a darker interpretation, which implies that the Olympic games are an opportunity for cities to justify removing the poor to enable the accumulation of capital.
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