It's Gotta Be The Shoes: Nike in the Spike-o-sphere

Public Culture, 1999

he brand has become a prime exemplar of the global ecumene: a symbol of cross-national commodification and the logic of simulation (fig. 1). 1 In observing the movements of the Nike brand in time and space, this essay is concerned to investigate the nature of the brand, one of the most powerful formations of the contemporary cultural economy (fig. 2). More specifically, the essay seeks to show how it is that the brand is now one of the most significant ways in which the objective properties of things are constituted. For, as Annette Weiner (1995: 18) argues, not only is culture itself a commodity but, "in the vast circulation of goods and ideas where boundaries evaporate and space and time are electronically compressed, things become different kinds of property" (my emphasis).

African American Review, 2004

This monograph analyzes how Nike and the athlete himself jointly commodified the public persona of LeBron James, with James cast in two normative narratives: (a) the Messiah and (b) hegemonic masculinity, stripping James of his Blackness and making him identifiable to a mainstream audience. The open-ended configuration of these narratives allows for ‘‘pivot points’’ in James’ life. Real-life developments fold into the construction of James, mitigating damage and shaping narratives in the process. New avenues of research in critical celebrity-branding analysis focus on areas such as the cross sections of endorsements and social media as well as the process of how mediated narratives normalize subjectivities.

InMedia, 2017

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Can also be titled: "The Cultural Circuit of Nike "Air Jordans" Excerpted from Petrina, S. (2001). The political ecology of design and technology education: An inquiry into methods. International Journal of Technology and Design Education 10, 207-237.

2008

Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2009

The thesis pursued in this article is that Niketche’s popularity owes more to the limits its internal exotic charge draws to provocation than to its provocative taboo-lifting undertone.

Sport In History, 2015

During the 1960s, adidas was the world's leading sports footwear manufacturer. Based in Bavaria and with a history stretching to the 1920s, the company dominated elite sports through aggressive promotion and innovative shoes that catered to athletes' needs. The ‘Superstar’ is one of the company's most successful models, still in production over 40 years since its launch in the late 1960s. Designed to wrest control of the basketball market from American rubber companies, in the two decades that followed it developed cultural meanings far beyond those envisaged by adidas, becoming associated with hip hop, a youth music and subculture born in 1970s New York. Arguing that design is shaped by use and consumption is allied to practice, this article examines the processes by which the ‘Superstar’ came into being, placing it into a wider context of changes within basketball, corporate ambition, and international trade. Tracing the actions and influence of young consumers in New York, it also considers how new ways of thinking about the shoe arose, spread, and were eventually commodified by adidas. It argues that a product's meaning can never be fixed, that producers and consumers are engaged in a constant dialogue over how things are used and perceived.

Forget the methods until you get the atmosphere right, then choose a method that fits that.