Call for Papers | “Pacific Sporting Cultures”, Special Issue of Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies | Call ends February 15, 2027

Guest Editor: Malcolm MacLean

Scratching the surface of sporting cultures across the Pacific Basin and Rim including Aotearoa/New Zealand suggests a varied array of colonial, commercial, and de- and postcolonial identities, forms, styles, and relations, often in tension, occasionally in cooperation, sometimes in ignorance of the other. Recent work in the field has opened important issues of Indigenization, for instance of cricket becoming kilikiti/kirikiti, of transnational sporting practices in American football, of new layers of complexity in our understandings of the history of surfing, and of women’s sports practices while pointing to the scholarly and practical silences those presences suggest. All this suggests this is an exciting time for Pacific sports scholarship.

This special issue of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, intended for publication in 2027, will explore Pacific and Pasifika, including Aotearoa/New Zealand, sporting cultures and identities. We are seeking the submission papers for consideration for inclusion from a range of disciplines including history, sociology, literary studies, museum studies, cultural studies, film and media studies, and interdisciplinary fields. Papers addressing the following issues will be especially welcome, as will other aspects of sporting cultures and identities:

• • • Transnational sporting identities and cultures
    • Sport in the Pasifika, including Māori, diaspora
    • Rituals, festivals, and traditional physical cultures
    • The global circulation of Indigenous Pasifika physical practices
    • Literatures of Pacific sport
    • Digital and visual approaches in Pacific sport
    • Pacific sport heritage and public history, including museums, archives, and memory and memorialization practices
    • The material cultures of Pacific sport
    • Conceptualising post- and de-colonial approaches to Pacific sport
    • Methodologies for the study of Pacific sport
    • Pacific physical cultures in a globalising and commercialising sport environment
    • Pacific sport/physical cultures/practices and environmentalism

We welcome submissions from scholars at any career stage, and especially from graduate students and early career researchers.

The Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studiesis a double-anonymized refereed journal. Articles, accompanied by a short biography, abstract and keywords, must be between 5000 and 8000 words, including notes and references, and must be formatted according to the journal style guide (https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/3182/intellect-house-style-guide-8th-ed.pdf).

Original interviews, research reports, review essays and exhibition reviews, between 1500 and 4000 words, are also welcome. The deadline for submissions is 15 February 2027. All article submissions will be subject to peer review.

For further information, please see the JNZPS portal at https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/nzps

Submit via the Intellect submission page at https://submission.pubkit.co/submissions/publisher/29/journal/416/login