2012 Theses Doctoral

Governing Social Bodies: Affect and Number in Contemporary Cricket

Arumugam, Sivakumar Vairavanather

Two recent cybernetics-derived academic disciplines, biomechanics and operations research, have worked to reshape cricket. Liberalization and the consequent large flows of money into the game have resulted in a transformation in how the game is regulated, coached, and played. In this dissertation, I have focused on how cricket is now being produced through an account of the use of biomechanics in the regulating and coaching of cricket and an appraisal of the role that operations research plays in regulating interruptions to individual games of cricket.

I argue that these twin developments correspond to Foucault's notion of a contemporary governmentality organized around the body as machine and the species of body, respectively. A consideration of the manner in which cybernetics underpins these practices and theories broadens and deepens accounts of both how the contemporary world is continually being shaped and being studied.