ABSTRACT
Each year in August, as the U.S. summer draws to a close, and children are looking to enjoy their last minutes of (relative) freedom from the near-police state of mandatory drug testing, metal detectors, and myriad forms of surveillance that has become the American schooling experience (Giroux, 2003; Grossberg, 2005), a celebrated enclave of spectacularized youthful innocence is played out over the radio, television, and the Internet-Th e Little League World S eries (LLWS). Th e e vent, annually held in W illiamsport, Pennsylvania, is a p articularly complex aff air that serves as a mass-mediated vehicle for the performance of many of the axioms and anxieties that characterize the contemporary (young) American condition. Following Williams (1981), and given that any cultural production is rooted in particular historical, social, material, and symbolic relations (Andrews, 2006), we assert that popular mediated sport events, such as the LLWS, are both constituted by and a co nstituent o f t he dis cursive fi elds t hat combine to form w hat are necess arily contextual understandings of Amer ican (sp orting) youth. Further, through its relative level of popularity, it could certainly be argued that the accumulated local (in this case, national) resonance of the LLWS is mobilized by its representation as a network television spectacle (Debord, 1994; Tomlinson, 2002).
