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The article focuses on Sport is arguably the most powerful of all the forms of popular culture in places like Australia and Canada. It mentions modern sports are the product of a world driven by ideologies of White supremacy and processes of genocidal colonization. It also mentions sporting stories tend to be a key cultural site for the reproduction and dissemination of these dehumanizing notions of a natural order.

As with many other male-dominated sports, for over a century of its history, Australian Rules Football organizations resisted and undermined women's participation in the game. The first league for women footballers commenced in Victoria in 1981. Since then, the growth in women's participation has been substantial, and in 2017, a professional women's Australian Football League (AFLW) commenced. The next phase of the participation of women in football is approaching, and heralds an opportunity for women to (re)gain power within the sport. In October 2019, thirty percent of women players rejected the proposed Collective Bargaining Agreement from the Australian Football League (AFL), with the underlying sentiment of wanting a stronger voice in the vision for the future of their game. This paper examines how changing participation rates in community football can transform the narrative of women's football from one of subsidized welfare to women players being necessary for the survival of football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian Football League fans often narrate particularly distressing finals losses in tragic terms. Drawing from the field of tragedy studies, this paper examines the way such losses are experienced and told, and the suffering and possible pleasures these accounts reveal. How, I ask, do these losses engender so much pain? And why do fans continually return to their memories of these defeats, when each return re-awakens the grief? These questions lead me to consider the relationship of tragedy to trauma, and the contentious nature and meaning of catharsis, a term common to the analysis of both tragedy and sport., We wouldn't think anything of tragedy if we did not have a deeply ingrained sense of order already there to be affronted. Tragedy in life, as art ... exposes by [...]

Battiston and Sestigiani's paper examines a string of articles by Diego Novelli that appeared in «l'Unità» in 1971. These articles not only represent a detailed account of Novelli's trip to Australia but also a unique point of view on the Italian migrant workers' economic and working conditions, and the migrant workers' degree of integration into the social fabric of the host country. The paper argues that Novelli's trip aimed, on one hand, to expose the consequences of the Italian Government's emigration policy and the dire straits the Italian migrant working class in Australia had been experiencing. On the other hand, archival sources reveal that Novelli's trip hoped to lay down the foundations for a political activity geared to attract Italian migrants towards the Italian Communist Party and the Left. This was all the more facilitated by the conditions of exploitation of Italian emigrants found by Novelli Down Under. The essay by Daniela Cosmini-Rose and Desmond O'Connor examines the attitudes to Italian migration to Australia expressed in the press of both countries in the years preceding and following the signing of the agreement in 1951. It documents the ways that the two governments reacted to the Australian recession of 1952, which was unanticipated and for which Australia was unprepared, and how the press in Italy and Australia reported the protests and riots involving newly-arrived Italian migrants. It reaffirms the view that, unlike those who were sponsored by relatives or friends, the least «assisted» Italian migrants were in fact those who entered Australia as part of the government-assisted migration scheme. Francesco Ricatti and Matthew Klugman consider some of the results of an oral history project conducted in Sydney, on the importance of football (soccer) in migrants' lives. Through the analysis of 32 interviews with Italians who migrated to Australia in the postwar period, and with their children, the article aims to demonstrate the importance of football in the historical study of Italian communities abroad. The article focuses in particular on those themes that are central to the memories and reflections of the interviewees. These include the importance of their football passion, the role played by soccer in processes of adaptation and integration, the construction of complex identities through football fandom and sporting activities, and the proud awareness of the contribution of Italians to the development of football in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The people of Melbourne are renowned for their 'football fever', yet this fever is under-studied. This paper addresses this fever by exploring the loves, suffering, and strange identifications of Australian Football League fans. Building on and complicating Freud's theories of group psychology, I argue that love, or rather two loves, are at the heart of the experience of being a fan. Fans love their club in a manner that incorporates the club into their sense of self, with the club becoming an ideal that is to be served. This love facilitates a particular form of identification where fans experience the club's trials, tribulations and triumphs, as if they too were being subjected to them. Moreover, in identifying with their club through love, the fan also takes on a second love, that of the club's object of desire, the elusive premiership. This is the love of the conquest and pursuit, a love that entails pain and suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features several books related to culture, health and sexuality of individuals. 'Dangerous Emotions,' by Alphonso Lingis; 'Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities and Youth: Psychological Perspective,' edited by Anthony R. D'Augeli and Charlotte J. Patterson; 'Indicent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics,' by Maria Althaus-Reid.

The article presents a reply to Braham Dabsheck's review of "Black and Proud" which claims that an opportunity was missed in writing a more definitive book on the nature of Australia and did not focus enough on the Australian Football League (AFL). It notes how Dabsheck erred when he claimed that the important contributions of Ian Warren and Spiros Tsousis and Ciannon Cazaly were ignored and the use of photographs as the focal point since it is where the social and cultural memory coalesces.