About the project
Given that the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) has grown from a minor venture in 1979 to become a multi-million dollar, transnational technology battle and terrestrial multi-media phenomenon in 2010, sometimes with as much as 800 million TV viewers annually, the relevance of studying WRC from a sociological angle has become apparent. This PhD project seeks to investigate how the WRC, which each year is run in fourteen countries on three different continents, evoke socio-cultural, economic and logistic processes in society. Moreover, using the WRC as systems manager of transnational processes, I seek to contribute to the development of ethnographic research techniques adapted to a globalizing world.
Fieldwork, Rally Finland 2010
Supervisors
Anne Krogstad, professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography (Faculty of Social Sciences).
Helge Jordheim, Academic director Kultrans (Faculty of Humanities).
Hans Erik Næss works at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography.
Næss' project blog.