Category: Professional Wrestling
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Community at AAW
It takes a community to build a wrestling promotion. We have been going to AAW shows now for over a year. We have been to see them in the various venues they use in Chicago — Logan Square Auditorium, 115 Bourbon Street, the Berwyn Eagles Club, and Joe’s Live at Rosemont. We have watched some…
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Past, Present and Future of Pro-Wrestling
At the 2017 C2E2 convention, I was joined by a great panel of professional wrestling professionals, fans and scholars to discuss how we see the past, present and future of “sports entertainment” from this particular point in time. On this panel are the following: Dave Prazak (Shimmer Women’s Professional Wrestling), Mike Kingston (Headlocked comic), Matt…
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Wrestling Studies MPCA/ACA 2017 CFP
Midwest PCA/ACA 2017 Area: Wrestling Studies Area Co-Chairs: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson The 2017 Midwest PCA/ACA conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch from Wednesday-Sunday, October 18-22. Call: Past, Present and Future of Professional Wrestling Since this is the inaugural conference for this new area, the Wrestling…
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ECW on The Pop Culture Lens
In the thirty-fourth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I welcome friend of the podcast Ryan Schriml to discuss the innovative nature and legacy of Extreme Championship Wrestling — or, ECW! ECW! ECW! In this episode, our discussion focuses on how the innovations of Paul Heyman and…
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Fourth Wall and Professional Wrestling
In this brief essay, I want to share an idea I have had about how the concept of audience interaction helps to define sports entertainment as existing at the intersection of sports and entertainment. Audience interaction with content (what I have written about here as content interactivity) is the idea that the audience member (either…
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Convergent Wrestling: Call for Chapters
Official Call for Chapter Proposals Title: Colliding Inside the Squared Circle: The Convergent Nature of Professional Wrestling Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University) & Christopher J. Olson (Dominican University) Purpose: The concept of convergence represents one of the most pervasive buzzwords in media studies, but with good reason. In essence, convergence concerns how the boundaries…
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Experiencing the Co-Construction of Kayfabe: AAW Take No Prisoners
This blog post expands on the ideas of the co-construction of kayfabe, an idea I presented at the Popular Culture Association 2016 conference in Seattle. For this post, I reflect on a live wrestling event I attended in an attempt to define what my partner, Christopher Olson, and I mean by “convergent wrestling.” The entire presentation…
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