I’m very happy with this article. It came out a while ago but I haven’t written about it until now, except for this Twitter thread. The general idea is to explore the implications of the New Norm Olympic reforms as played out on the ground in Paris. This is one of the publications I promised as part of my postdoc project at the University of Lausanne. That project is now very nearly concluded, so it’s time to take stock of what I’ve accomplished and what still remains to do. I have a handful of publications still in the pipeline and I hope I’ll be able to share official news about them soon. But this here is, I think, the crown jewel of the project overall.

What I like best about this piece is the marriage of the reformed Olympics with Deleuzian thinking. Despite my enthusiasm for this stuff, I try not to play too much with theory for theory’s sake, so it’s usually a bit of a challenge to figure out how to ground these flights of fancy into something more immediately relevant. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard here, and it seemed natural to use a rhizomatic approach to take stock of the mixed successes and failures of reform, and to investigate those processes on the ground in Paris. I think I translated this thinking pretty clearly in the text, and I hope you agree.

It’s open access and I hope you enjoy reading!