With increasing globalization and professionalization of sports, athletes, coaches and other sports personnel move across regional and national borders to take up work with increasing frequency, and our scholarly approaches to sport can no longer presume the boundaries of nation-states as the natural context for sport. Today, transnational mobility holds important consequences for national and international sport governing bodies, local clubs and individual athletes’ careers and lives.

This invited session and satellite symposium bring together senior and young researchers whose expertise includes sports and mobility, sports and professionalization, as well as sport, race and gender. In relation to existing research on sports labour migration (developing predominantly macro-structural perspectives on the global flows of athletes) this session and satellite symposium will present new theoretical perspectives on athletes’ mobility and bring the experiences of the players themselves forward through case studies of male and female athletes’ mobility in sports.

The invited session ”Sports labour mobility and the politics of precarity” will start at 10.20 on June 26th (for more information see the programme for the ECSS Conference). The concept of precarity is taken from among others the British economist, Guy Standing, who has examined the processes through which many a modern worker is becoming part of the ‘precariat’ combining the concepts precarious and proletariat (Standing 2011). The defining characteristic of members of the precariat is the unstable and short-term nature of their employment underpinned by a low probability of building a career. The three presentations in the session will alert attention to the variety and specificity of precarious issues for male as well as female athletes in various parts of the world of sport.

Niko Besnier

The first speaker is Professor Niko Besnier from Amsterdam University, the Netherlands, who is heading the project “Globalization, Sports and the Precarity of Masculinity”, an Advanced Research Grant funded by the European Research Council. Professor Besnier will report on the most current findings from multi-sited comparative ethnographic research on the hopes of young men in the so-called Global South and the migratory actions that derive from them.

Carmen Rial

The second speaker will be Professor Carmen Rial from University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted since 2003 about the careers and life styles of Brazilian football players living in more than 10 countries, this presentation compares the experiences of players who migrate to China, India, Korea, Morocco or Uruguay to celebrity players who work at global clubs in Europe. It addresses cultural, political and economic implications of this form of circulation.

Sine Agergaard

The third speaker is associate Professor, Sine Agergaard, Aarhus University, Denmark, who will report on precarious issues arising in a critical case study of African female athletes’ migration into and away from Scandinavian football clubs. Attention will be given to the fact that even though Scandinavian clubs and audiences employ and consume an increasing number of transnational athletes, there is no policy framework set up to ensure support to their dual career development and post-career transition.

In the afternoon of the 26th of June a satellite symposium to the ECSS Conference will be held five minutes away at Malmö University. The focus will be on the Scandinavian context, since this is the final seminar for a Nordic collaborative research project, a project that has consisted of a number of PhD projects based at various Scandinavian universities (see www.ph.au.dk/nordcorp). The studies have been using women’s football in Scandinavia – a leading centre of the game at a global level – as a case for analysing crucial changes in the Nordic civil society model of sport resulting from globalization and professionalization processes.

At the satellite symposium, six presentations will be held, mostly by PhD-students. The themes will be:

• Branding of Scandinavian football (Mattias Melkersson, Malmö University)
• Sport Development or Sport for Development? A comparative analysis of two Scandinavian football interventions, LdB FC For Life (South Africa) and Open Fun Football Schools (Moldova) (Niklas Hafen, Malmö University)
• The feminisation of football in Europe (Svenja-Maria Mintert, Copenhagen University)
• African Footballers in Scandinavia (Mari Haugaa Engh, Aarhus University)
• Racism among African Minority Youth in Norway (Prisca Bruno Masao, Oslo University)
• Female footballers in a new field – cultures collide in a Finnish football team (Pauliina Poikolainen, Jyväskylä University)

The discussion panel will consist of Kari Fasting, Bente O. Skogvang, Bo Carlsson, Gertrud Pfister, Torbjörn Andersson and Sine Agergaard.

Everybody is welcome to attend this symposium/mini-conference, which will take place between 13.30 and 18.45 at the Orkanen building in room D 222.

Torbjörn Andersson, Senior Lecturer,
Dept. of Sports Sciences, Malmö University

Sine Agergaard, Associate Professor,
Section for Sport Science, Aarhus University