Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity ─ Being in the zone

This volume offers groundbreaking research that brings sociological and cultural studies to bear on the idea of being in the zone. There is original research on musicians, dancers and surfers and new ideas that show being in the zone has to be understood in relation to its social and cultural context and that far from being exclusively individualised and private ‘bitz’ is social and can be collective.

We have all heard about ‘being in the zone’ and many of us think we understand that this means someone performing in a different, highly competent and pleasurable way. Musicians, sportspeople and workers all report these kinds of experiences. But being in the zone remains poorly understood and disconnected from social and cultural factors.

Being in the zone is not just the province of the athlete who suddenly and seemingly without extra effort swims faster or jumps higher or the musician who suddenly plays more than perfectly, but also of the doctor working under intense pressure or the programmer staying up all night. The meaning of such experiences for convincing people to work in intense conditions, often with short term contracts, is explored to show how being in the zone can have problematic effects and have negative and constraining as well as creative and productive implications.

Written in a stimulating and accessible style, Being in the Zone will strongly appeal to students and researchers who aim to understand the experience of work, creativity, musicianship and sport. Issues of the body are also central to being in the zone and will make this book relevant to anyone studying the body. This collection will establish being in the zone as an important area of enquiry for social science and the humanities.

Tim Jordan is a Professor and Head of School of Media, Film and Music at Sussex University. Tim has been involved in analysis of the social and cultural meaning of the internet and cyberspace since the mid-1990s. He is currently working on a book for Pluto Press on the politics of information and on the idea of 'being in the zone' among surfers and computer programmers. His recent work has been about communication and the internet, published in Internet, Society, Culture; communicative practices before and after the internet (Bloomsbury 2013) and he has previously published: Hacking: digital media and technological determinism (Polity 2008), Cyberpower (Routledge 1999) and, with Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars (Routledge 2004). Tim has also played a role in analysing social movements and popular protest with publications including Activism!: direct action, hacktivism and the future of society (Reaktion 2002), as co-editor of Storming the Millennium (Lawrence and Wishart 1999, with Adam Lent) and as a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Social Movement Studies. In addition to his books on social movements and internet cultures, Tim has published on Pokemon, surfing and technology and cultural theory. Tim began work at the University of Sussex in 2014. Prior to this Tim worked at King’s College London for three years and in? Sociology at the Open University for eleven years, contributing widely to teaching and co-editing the books Security: sociology and the making of social worlds (Manchester University Press 2008, with Simon Carter and Sophie Watson) and Social Change (Blackwell 2002, with Steve Pile).

Brigid (B) McClure’s research focuses on questions of the embodied self and relations with others, with a particular interest in intercorporeality, gender and pleasure. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative, drawing from philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, ethnography and practice-based research. She is currently writing up her ESRC-funded PhD in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King's College, London. Her thesis involves a detailed case-study of social salsa dancing and draws on a decade of personal experience dancing in London and internationally across the world. The relationship between theory and practice works both ways as she explores the ideas emerging through her academic research in her social dancing and teaching. She regularly works with local dancers in London and most recently has been invited to dance and teach in Russia, Tunisia and Romania.

McClure’s interest in bodily practices and experiences stems from her background as a musician and an athlete. She has played violin and viola since a young age, and received her BA (Hons) in music from Cambridge University in 2004, graduating with first class honours as a Whytehead Scholar and Larmor Award winner from St John's College. After pursuing her interest in sport through playing international lacrosse and working in rugby sponsorship and partnership management, she returned to full-time study and received her MPhil in multi-disciplinary gender studies from Cambridge University in 2011.

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, where she was recently head of the sociology department. She works on feminist, materialist critical theories, embodiment and affect, mostly within the field of sport. Recent books include Embodied Sporting Practices, (Palgrave, 2009)Sex Power and the Games, (2012,Palgrave) on the explanatory reach of sex, gender and the idea of enfleshed selves and Sporting Times, (2012, Palgrave) on temporalities in sport, developing a conceptualisation of the intensities and expressiveness of ‘real time’, which led to an invitation to curate the Chasing Time Exhibition at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (June, 2014-January,2015). Kath has worked extensively on boxing which has led to publications, Boxing Masculinity and Identity, the "I" of the Tiger, (2006, Routledge )and Globalising Boxing, (Bloomsbury, 2014) and a film about boxing and art, A Bloody Canvas (RTE, 2010), about which she has written in journals. Ethnography, Sport in History and in Objects and Materials (2014, Routledge). Kath has taught interdisciplinary undergraduate social sciences and sociology and women’s studies at undergraduate and post graduate levels. She is the author of the popular introductory social sciences text, Social Sciences; the Big Issues (2013,Routledge, 3rd edition). She has also published on feminist theories and methods with Sophie Woodward, Why Feminism Matters, (2009, Palgrave) and the psychosocial approaches which inform much of her work, Introduction to Psychosocial Studies (Routledge, 2015).Kath is an editor of the journal Sociology. She was Principal Investigator with Tim Jordan on an AHRC funded project on 'Being in the Zone', in music, sport and the cultural industries, which inspires the project of this volume.