Thrills & Skills: A Sociological Study of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC)

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).