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507Ludonarrative dissonance and dominant narrativesJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 44 (1): 44-54. 2017.This paper explores ludonarrative dissonance as it occurs in sport, primarily as the conflict experienced by participants between dominant narratives and self-generated interpretations of embodied experience. Taking self-narrative as a social rather than isolated production, the interaction with three basic categories of dominant narrative is explored: transformative, representing a spectrum from revelatory to distorting, bullying and colonising. These forms of dominant narrative prescribe inter…Read more
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480Convention, Audience, and Narrative: Which Play is the Thing?Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 38 (2): 135-148. 2011.This paper argues against the conception of sport as theatre. Theatre and sport share the characteristic that play is set in a conventionally-defined hypothetical reality, but they differ fundamentally in the relative importance of audience and the narrative point of view. Both present potential for participants for development of selfhood through play and its personal possibilities. But sport is not essentially tied to audience as is theatre. Moreover, conceptualising sport as a form of th…Read more
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404Play, performance, and the docile athleteSport, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (1). 2007.I respond to a hypothetical critique of sport, drawing on primarily post-modernist sources, that would view the high performance athlete in particular as a product of the application of technical disciplines of power and that opposes sport and play as fundamentally antithetical. Through extensive discussion of possible definitions of play, and of performance, I argue that although much of the critique is valid it confuses a method of sport for the whole of it. Play is indeed a noncompellable s…Read more
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462Different Kinds of Perfect: The Pursuit of Excellence in Nature-Based SportsSport, Ethics and Philosophy 6 (3): 353-368. 2012.Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthet…Read more
Saskatoon, Canada
Areas of Interest
The Self |
Practical Identity |
Existentialism |
19th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Sport |