Sport permeates social life yet still occupies a marginal position within Geography. While research on sport has expanded across Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Political Economy, spatial categories are frequently mobilized descriptively rather than analytically. As a result, territorial power relations, embodied inequalities, scalar dynamics and spatial exclusions often remain underexplored.
Since the 1990s, scholars such as John Bale and Gilmar Mascarenhas have contributed to consolidating sport as a legitimate analytical object within Geography. However, the field still faces important epistemological and methodological challenges. This special issue seeks to strengthen a critical geography of sport attentive to coloniality, commodification, uneven development, gendered spatialities, and forms of resistance emerging through sporting practices.
Inspired by critical geographical traditions, this issue invites theoretically grounded and empirically rigorous contributions examining sport as a spatial, territorial, embodied and political phenomenon. We especially welcome interdisciplinary dialogues capable of advancing critical understandings of power geometries in sport across different cultural and geographical contexts.
Topics of Interest
- Territorial configurations, territorial identities and sporting spatialities
- Indigenous sporting practices and territorial affirmation
- Body politics, gendered spatialities and embodied resistance
- Women’s football and feminist geographies of sport
- Subaltern voices, racialized hierarchies and alterities in sport
- Mega-events, urban governance and socio-spatial inequalities
- Grassroots movements contesting spatial exclusion
- Critical cartography, spatial ethnography and participatory methodologies
- Critical GIS and methodological innovations in sports geography
- Interdisciplinary dialogues between Geography, Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Key Questions
- How do sporting territorialities reproduce colonial spatial orders?
- How do women’s sporting practices reshape territorial affiliations and embodied identities?
- How can feminist geographical approaches reveal body politics in sport?
- What forms of resistance emerge against privatization and spatial exclusion in sport?
- How do sporting infrastructures participate in uneven urbanization?
- What methodological innovations emerge from critical geographies of sport?
- How do interdisciplinary approaches contribute to the consolidation of sports geography?
This special issue examines how sporting practices function as complex spatial phenomena that simultaneously reproduce and challenge power structures. By bringing together contributions from different disciplinary and geographical contexts, the issue aims to consolidate a stronger critical geography of sport capable of addressing territorial disputes, embodied inequalities, colonial legacies and contemporary forms of resistance.
We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions from scholars working across different regions, particularly those engaging with Global South perspectives, feminist methodologies and anti-colonial approaches.
Organised by
Jonathan Ferreira (UNESP/ULB), Jean-Michel De Waele (ULB), María Verónica Ibarra (UNAM).
Submission Guidelines
- Full papers: 6,000–8,000 words
- Submission deadline: 31st July 2026
- Double-blind peer review
- Expected publication: Second semester of 2026
- Submissions in English
