Session: Power and Justice in Sport
Tuesday, 17 July 2018: 08:30-10:20
Session Organizer: Mary MCDONALD, Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, USA
This session seeks papers that deal with the ways in which power and justice are exercised and/or resisted through sport. Possible topics include but are not limited to: theoretical discussions of sport, justice and/or power: policies that seek justice and fairness in sport; activisms, social movements and sport; discourses of race, gender, class and/or sexuality as remade and or challenged through sporting practices.
We encourage all participants to take up RC27 membership to benefit from priority in abstract selection, as well as networking opportunities through the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) eBulletin and annual conferences.
Deep Strike: Playing Gender in the World of Overwatch a Case Study of Geguri in Esport
- Yeomi CHOI, Korea National Sport University, Republic of Korea
- Nida AHMAD, University of Waikato, New Zealand
- Janine SLAKER, Michigan State University, USA
Electronic sport or “eSport” has grown to a global-sport entertainment industry with a projected growth of 1.5 billion dollars (USD) by 2020 (Dunn, 2017). Despite its development and considerable attention from scholars within several disciplines, sport academics have largely focused on a philosophical question of whether this activity can be defined as sport (Funk, 2017). Scholarly interests and debates on the importance of eSport as a cultural space where diverse identities and representations traverse have been neglected within sociology of sport literature. The number of females entering the eSport community– both as gamers and spectators– is growing, yet the eSport arena remains overwhelmingly male dominated, and female gamers face online abuse and harassment in the form of sexism and/or racism (“Very few women”, 2016). For this presentation, we provide a case study of the South Korean female gamer, Kim Se-yeon, also known as Geguri, to discuss issues around gender in eSports. Drawing from feminist cultural scholarship, in particular, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, we conducted a textual analysis to address the androcentric and misogynistic nature of the contemporary gaming culture of eSport. It is further suggested that eSport has a subversive potential to de/reconstruct the inflexible categories regarding sex and gender in sport.
Disrupting the Feminine Athletic: Whiteness, Heterosexuality and Women’s Sport in Africa
- Mari ENGH, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
On the African continent sport has, particularly in the last two decades, been hailed as a useful tool in the quest for nation building and social cohesion. A popular claim is that sport has a particularly powerful role to play in achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, and that the pride imbued in national teams and athletes can foster national unity and cohesion across historical divides. As a result, a variety of sport-for-development projects and programmes have emerged across the African continent in the last 20 years. Yet, what often remains uncontested in assertions about the benefits and potentials of sport, are the ways in which sport also produces and sustains processes of inclusion and exclusion, frequently along sex, gender and race lines. Sport has social and cultural significance precisely because it justifies and reproduces normativities around gender, race, sexuality and embodiment.
In this presentation, I will critically examine how sport development projects and public policy discourses on sport reproduce heternormative and racialised ideas about women’s sport and women athletes in South Africa. Firstly, I will highlight how the sport for development industry relies on conceptualisations of African women as under-developed, disempowered and physically inactive, so as to rationalise their own existence. In this, the normativity of whiteness and heterosexuality is also sustained. Secondly, I will illustrate how South African public policy and popular discourses on women and sport are complicit in these representational practices through silencing critical debates of sexuality and homophobia, and through domesticating and feminising black sportswomen’s appearances and performances. In so doing, the presentation will raise critical concerns regarding the need to de-colonise academic and public engagements with sport, gender, sexualities and race on the African continent.
“What Qualifies a Woman to Compete As a Woman?” – Intersexuality in Sport
- Nicole WERTECKI, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
- Sandra GÜNTER, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
The examination and standardization of testosterone levels for female athletes have been suspended in 2015 after the female sprinter Dutee Chand has pressed charges against the IAAF’s Hyperandrogenism Regulation at the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS). The suspension of the „IAAF Regulation Governing Eligibility of Females with Hyperandrogenism to Compete in Women’s Competition“ for female athletes for two years has ignited a debate about the justification of gender affiliation and negotiation of gender binary in sports. This regulation might be declared void, depending on the scientific evidence that the IAAF needs to file until the end of September 2017. The IAAF has to verify a coherence between higher testosterone levels and advantages in performance or otherwise this policy will be abrogated. We would like to discuss the gender norms, power relations, and the logic of argumentation that have been applied during this ongoing debate on regulating the female body in sports by analyzing the discourse on this issue.
Biopolitics at Play: Locating Human Rights, Refugees and Grassroots Humanitarianism in the Calais Jungle
- Darragh MCGEE, University of Bath, United Kingdom
- Juliette PELHAM, University of Bath, United Kingdom
This paper examines the biopolitical footprint of a new wave of grassroots humanitarian organisations in the informal refugee camp, popularly dubbed ‘The Jungle’, in Calais, northern France. Set against the formal humanitarian void created by the French state barring of international aid agencies, and the abject conditions of camp life, we trace the shifting socio-spatial remit and progressive politicisation of these ‘apolitical’, volunteer-based organisations as they encounter a crisis of human rights in the Jungle, prior to its violent demolition by state decree in October 2016. In foregrounding the quotidian perspective of two organisations, Play4Calais and the Refugee Youth Service, and their unorthodox deployment of physical cultural forms such as play, sport, cinema and art, we reveal a grassroots humanitarian praxis which not only stands in tension with the violent border sovereignties of neoliberal states, but which opens up the inchoate possibility for political struggle and refugee-centred claims-making over the right to inhabit the ‘exceptional’ space of the camp.
Sport, Nationalism and Global Multi-Identity Tension in Two Para-Sport Cities: London and Toronto
- Jill LE CLAIR, Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, United Kingdom
This paper presents results from a two-year study of the complex, sometimes contradictory identities of residents after the mega-sport events of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, and the Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan American Games. Results from questionnaires illustrated tensions and intersections of bodily identities based on family origins and/or place of birth (nationality), citizenship, gender, dis/ability, and race/ethnicity. How the body is perceived and framed varied according to the context; unique government typologies such as Black British and Canadian Métis, historical factors, national discourses, and local political tensions impacted on perceptions of the self, and of para-athletes in mega-events (Beacom & Brittain 2017). Initially para-sport was focused on rehabilitation and disability-based, but after 1989 it increasingly shifted to sport-based competition with the emphasis on high performance as disabled athletes were renamed para-athletes and Paralympians (Le Clair 2016). Increasing size of the Games and media coverage led to celebrity, and their training and skills were described as ‘inspirational’ in both cities.
In a global world people ‘choose,’ or are given, elements that make up their multi-identities; race/colour and the separate ‘national’ identities of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Bond 2016; Simpson et al 2016) made up Team GB (Great Britain) in the Paralympic Games. However, 36.7% of London’s population was foreign-born (2011 UK Census), and 76.5% of participants identified as British. In Canada, hyphenated identity is an expected part of daily life (eg. Chinese-Canadian), and of the federal government’s official multicultural policy (Jedwab 2016). 48.6% of the population in Toronto is foreign-born (Statistics Canada 2011) and 76.4% of participants identified as Canadian, with 76% supporting Canadian teams. Other Canadian identities are those of Quebec, the majority French-speaking province, and the Indigenous First Nations (arguing for full autonomy), but all compete in para-sport as part of Team Canada.
Session: Sport and Social Inequalities. Part I
Tuesday, 17 July 2018: 10:30-12:20
Session Organizer: Christine DALLAIRE, University of Ottawa, Canada
Sport can both reproduce and reinforce social inequalities and at the same time serve as a site of resistance and social change, albeit to unequal effects. This session invites papers that address either of these roles or the complex and complicated interaction of inclusion and exclusion through empirical and/or theoretical analysis of social relations in sport bounded by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, social class, nationality, age and so on. We encourage scholars to reflect on the relationship between sport and social inequalities by exploring inequalities of condition, opportunity and capability. Papers can, furthermore, focus on the effects of inequalities and resistance on sports participants and organizations or instead examine sport’s ambiguous impact on broader social change.
We encourage all participants to take up RC27 membership to benefit from priority in abstract selection, as well as networking opportunities through the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) eBulletin and annual conferences.
Understand the “Black Box” of a Sports-Based Intervention Program: The Strength of Social Ties
- Nicolas MOREAU, University of Ottawa, Canada
Although there exists many sports-based intervention programs for youth, little is known about the underlying processes of these types of programs, i.e what we call the “Black Box” of a sport program. Furthermore, the perspectives of youth are seldom taken into account even if the intervention program is designed “for them”. The data presented in this conference is the result of a long-term action research with a Montreal organization using sport in a psychosocial perspective. More specifically, our objective was to understand, from the youth perspective, the processes and key dimensions of sports-based interventions that contribute to the development of youth social bonds. In our perspective, such bonds are essential to reduce stigmatisation, discrimination and inequities. Methodologically, we conducted 27 interviews with youths, a focus group with five coaches and “observant participation” of trainings and challenges. We found that six elements are essential for this sports-based intervention program : (1) Implementation of a supportive climate; (2) Implementation of collaborative strategies that promote group cooperation; (3) Equilibrium between outside rules and self-initiated actions; (4) Collectivisation of individual performances; (5) Interconnectedness of effort and pleasure; and (6) Exploring beyond the participants’ comfort zones. We conclude that these six conditions can positively transform social bonds between youth as well as between youth and coaches. Indeed, sport can be a tool for social transformation (reduction of social inequalities, empowerment, strengthening social bonds, etc.) but this has to be done through reflexive practices.
Participation Versus Performance: A Critical Appraisal of (dis)Ability, Gender and Cultural Diversity in Junior-Age Sport
- Ramon SPAAIJ, Victoria University, Australia
- Ruth JEANES, Monash University, Australia
- Karen FARQUHARSON, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
- Sean GORMAN, Curtin University, Australia
- Dean LUSHER, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Junior-age sport is an important site where children and young people learn about social norms and develop attitudes toward people with diverse backgrounds and abilities. It thus presents a space where social inequalities can be reproduced, reinforced or challenged. How diversity is experienced and managed in junior sport can affect how participants are socialised to understand and respond to diversity throughout their lives. This paper discusses the findings of a three-year mixed methods research project that critically examined how diversity is understood, experienced and managed in junior sports clubs in Australia, and to what extent including people with diverse backgrounds and abilities is deemed compatible with promoting sporting excellence and competitiveness. The findings show that intersectional understandings of and approaches to diversity are virtually non-existent in junior sports clubs. Moreover, the research reveals a persistent tension between the promotion of diversity and inclusion on the one hand, and the focus on performance on the other hand, in ways that tend to reproduce social inequalities in junior sport.
To be White Korean: Race, Masculinities, and Nationalism in Global Korean Ice Hockey
- Yeomi CHOI, Korea National Sport University, Republic of Korea
Transnational sport migration constructs an imagined national community driven by flexibly attuned citizenship (Ong, 1999). In addition to sporting individuals’ aspiration to move across borders, governments play a crucial role in the process of recruitment and placement of the sport professionals to strengthen their national power. Since 2011, the South Korean government has been allowing outstanding athletes to attain Korean citizenship. By implementing policy called ‘Special Naturalization,’ more than twenty athletes were naturalized in Korea, many of whom will represent Team Korea at the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. However, given the historical racial and ethnic homogeneity within Korean society (Lee, Jackson, & Lee, 2007), this new flexible citizenship is controversial, as it challenges hegemonic discourses of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global Koreanness. For this presentation, I focus on the Korean national ice hockey team, which comprises the greatest number of naturalized athletes, to explore the newly imagined white Korean subjectivities. In doing so, I investigate discursively constructed immigrant citizenship of hockey player migrants in relation to socio-cultural contexts of gender, race, class, and sexuality through analyzing media coverage and political documents.
The Sports Experience in the Curumim Program of Sesc Ribeirão Preto (Brazil)
- Maria Clara PONTOGLIO, Serviço Social do Comércio, University of São Paulo, Brazil
- Myrian NUNOMURA, University of São Paulo, Brazil
In 1946, the Sesc – Social Service of Commerce – was created seeking to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of workers in Brazil. Over time, Sesc has become an active institution in the field of Non-Formal Education (MAGALHÃES, MARTIN, 2013), offering access to cultural places and productions. In 1988, the socio-educational program Curumim, which cares for children from 7 to 12 years old of low-income families, was implemented in Sesc Ribeirão Preto and includes various contents, as well as the sport, aiming at the integral development of participants (SERVIÇO SOCIAL DO COMÉRCIO, 1986). According to Bourdieu’s studies, it was identified the potential of the Curumim Program to expand the cultural capital and to attribute new compositions to the habitus (BOURDIEU, 2008) of its participants. This research sought to understand how the sports practice experienced in Curumim influenced the relationship of the former participants with the sport. The methodology used was the Grounded Theory (STRAUSS; CORBIN, 2008); six adults who participated in the Curumim in Sesc Ribeirão Preto and two people who have worked as educators in that program were interviewed. In data analysis, five categories were established: “Sports experiences in school and in other places”; “Sports experiences in Curumim”; “Loss of contact with the sport”; “Continuity of sports practice” and; “Curumim as ‘an open window’: discoveries, learning and influences”, the latter being the main category. At last, it was possible to perceive that the former participants were influenced in adolescence and in adulthood by the sports practice experienced in Curumim, leading to the involvement of some of them in work activities related to sport, such as the Physical Education career. It has also been identified that Curumim can modify the habitus of its participants, as well as sensitize to a wider vision of their own lives.
Soccer As a Strategy to Overcome Extreme Poverty? Social Mobility and Sport in Brazil
- Fernando BURGOS, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil
- Carlos Heller MANDEL, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil
Sport has been pointed out for many years as a factor of social development for individuals or communities (Loy, 1969; Eisen and Turner, 1992; Coalter, Allison and Taylor, 2000; Collins & Kay, 2002; Kay, 2009; and others). Some researchers analyze this mobility potential more critically (Frey & Eitzen, 1991; Eitzen,2009; Black, 2010; Spaaij, 2013 and others). In Brazil, the potential of sport in human, social and economic development are constantly exalted, especially in soccer.. Millionaire salaries and fame, however, are only reality for a minority of soccer players who effectively experimented vertical social mobility, namely upward mobility by Lipset & Bendix (1992). In a context that places Brazil as the third worst Gini Index in Latin America and the Caribbean (OXFAM, 2017) – the article analyzes whether football can remove children from extreme poverty, as often touted. Through a case study in the Santos Football Club – home of extraordinary players like Pele and, more recently, Neymar – we’ve conducted semi-structured interviews with youth academy’s staff. Also, we’ve observed the so-called “trials” in which children and adolescents are chosen to pursue a career in the club and interviewed some mothers of young candidates. The results show that despite the common financial difficulties of many families, they can not be characterized as being in extreme poverty, but as a lower middle class. In addition, families who live far from the city, in general, receive support from relatives, friends or local businesses in order to facilitate participation in these “trials”, which shows some kind of social safety net. Decisively, we can not point out that Brazilian football is a common overcome strategy for extreme poverty, but there is no doubt that the dream of upward mobility of many poor families goes through crowded stadium and a lot of goals
Session: Sport and Social Inequalities. Part II
Friday, 20 July 2018: 10:30-12:20
Session Organizer: Christine DALLAIRE, University of Ottawa, Canada
Who Gets to Play? Role of Gender in Taking up Professional Sports in Pakistan.
- Azeema VOGELER, Center for Communication Programs, Pakistan
Youth constitute more than a third of the population of Pakistan which is a country of more than 200 million. Apart of looking at youth’s schooling and work, it is also important to study what they do for leisure including sports and games. These activities are not just important for their physical and psychological health but also bolsters their social skills, improves learning capacity and protects them from various risky activities. Despite knowledge of these important outcomes through sports, access and participation of youth remains limited due to various reasons, ranging lack of resources, opportunities, facilities, societal views on sports and security concerns.
In Pakistan, participation of females in sports, especially in formal and structured ones are extremely limited as facilities and opportunities are limited. Hence, only those young girls who in an educational setup report involved in sports. However, since girls’ participation in education is increasing, their chances of being part of sports is also rising. Moreover, with increasing modernization and westernization culture and aspiration is also changing. Now, at least in larger cities of Pakistan, females are taking up sports professionally. Pakistan has professional sportswomen and teams for major games such as football, cricket, hockey, squash, boxing etc. However many of them have to strive to make it on their own to reach international arena as there is little support from community and government.
There are plethora of factors which impacts women’s participation in games and professional sports. The aim of this research is to explore these issues from different angels.
Data for this paper will be drawn from interviews of female university students who are part of formal sports teams and also coaches and sports officials. The interviews will explore the social, cultural, financial, and other factors that create barriers or facilitate women’s participation in sports.
Child Sex Tourism in the Context of the 2014 FIFA Football World Cup: The Case of the Host City of Recife, Brazil
- Cesar CASTILHO, Physical Education, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, Universidade Federal de São João Del Rei, Brazil
This study aims to analyse the issue of child sex tourism (CST) and its correlation with sporting mega-events, taking into consideration the implementation of preventive public policy in the host city of Recife (located in the north-east of Brazil), during the 2014 FIFA Football World Cup. Through a qualitative approach based on a three-year longitudinal study – using interviews, observation and photographs – the theme will be analysed by considering the involved social issues, and the implications for excluded sectors of society in the organization of so-called mega-events. A total of 36 interviews were conducted with 22 individuals, who were divided into three groups: project managers, local population and children abused. CST does not occur in a vacuum and cannot be disconnected from more general social, economic and cultural concerns, which are often overlooked in analyses. Although this study is based upon a short-term timescale, the results obtained in the analysed projects have been satisfactory, but over the long term, effective social and educational measures must be prioritized in order to improve the situation for the actors involved. As part of a sporting mega-event, the topic of child sex tourism remains marginal, particularly in countries where social inequality persists.
Racial Taunts or Just Trash Talking? South Asian Hockey Players and the Reluctance to Name Racism
- Courtney SZTO, Simon Fraser University, Canada
In Canada, we tend to “Canadiansplain” racist incidents away. To “Canadiansplain” involves a concession that racism exists in Canada but never to the extent that it does in the United States. These dismissals of racism imply that our multicultural policies will ultimately prevail; therefore, any concerns about racism are deemed frivolous, unfounded, and/or unpatriotic. Unfortunately, our collective reluctance to acknowledge the extent of racism in Canada seems to have left racialized hockey players confused about what does and does not count as racism. Through semi-structured interviews conducted with South Asian hockey players, parents, and coaches in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada, a disturbing pattern emerged whereby hockey players referred to on-ice racial slurs as regular hockey “chirping” or trash talking. Racism, to these participants, was reserved for those in their inner circles who treated them differently, but racial taunting from opponents was considered fair play in the name of competition. Crucially, if racism is a label only placed upon those assumed to be part of one’s in-group we must consider how this definition greatly alters the perceived “presence” of racism in hockey.
“Hockey Is for Everyone”: Racism, Homophobia, and Inequality in Canada’s Game
- Bridgette DESJARDINS, Carleton University, Canada
Hockey is undergoing a public relations face-lift. The National Hockey League’s (NHL) “Hockey is for everyone” initiative and brand new ‘Declaration of Principles’ affirm the league’s commitment to equality regardless of race, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc. The NHL is also partnered with external organizations focused on improving race relations and LGBTQ inclusion. Additionally, Hockey Canada’s Ontario branch introduced mandatory transgender education for coaches and trainers. Yet recent events show this commitment to equality is little more than lip service. The reigning championship team committed to visiting the White House on the same day football players (inspired by President Trump’s incendiary comments) protested anti-black police brutality. When team captain Ryan Getzlaf uttered a homophobic slur during the 2017 playoffs, the NHL leveled a pitiful reprimand, and Getzlaf offered an equally pitiful apology. When black player Joel Ward scored a game winning goal in the 2012 playoffs, fans unleased a twitter storm of racist hate, showing the bigoted underbelly of ‘hockey culture’. These events are the tip of a racist and homophobic iceberg. Using discourse analysis and queer theory I address the following questions: How does a sport predominantly played by white athletes perpetuate white privilege? How does homophobia manifest in the only professional sports league without an ‘out’ athlete? What structures exist within hockey organizations that nurture a racist and homophobic status quo? What sites of resistance exist within hockey institutions and/or culture? I analyze documents published by Hockey Canada (such as the limited trans inclusive dressing room policy created after a human rights complaint) and the NHL (primarily the Declaration of Principles), and compare the rhetoric espoused in these policies with the on-the-ice/ground action of both groups. Additionally, I look at player and fan social media commentary to connect the dark side of hockey culture with institutional practices.
Mismatched: A Quantitative Evaluation of Thinking Versus Doing Masculinity in Canadian Sport
- Max STICK, McMaster University, Canada
Sport is widely considered a hyper-masculine environment where sexist, homophobic, and other oppressive ideologies predominate. However, increasing pressure and activism for social equality is challenging the acceptability of these ideals. Considering liberalizing trends, this study investigates the state of masculinity through a study of Canadian male athletes, commonly believed to be archetypes of normative masculinity in Western society. This research examines whether stereotypical male gender norms are softening in a hyper-masculine environment, and the degree to which progressive social trends are suppressing the reproduction of patriarchy. Correspondence analysis of original survey data is used to explore the dynamic interrelationship between social norms and traditional masculine paradigms that structure contemporary conceptualizations and expressions of masculinity. The data indicate that masculinity is conflicted amongst the athletes in the sample, signified by a mismatch between ideologies and behaviours. These findings suggest that although progressive social developments are constraining discriminatory behaviours, the ideological foundations of oppressive masculinity remain intact. Progressive change has not fundamentally altered the structuration of a gender hierarchy in which heteronormative masculinity prevails.
Session: Sport, Spectacle and Mega-Events
Wednesday, 18 July 2018: 15:30-17:20
Session Organizer: John HORNE, University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom
Sports mega-events and global sport culture are structurally and experientially central to capitalist (post-) modernity. This session seeks to both assess this statement and explore other questions, including: What are the economic, political and social risks and benefits of hosting sports mega-events? What implications, if any, can be drawn from analyses of recent and forthcoming spectacular sports mega-events in the East and Global South for a broader understanding of changing relations of economic and political power on a global scale? To what extent do mega-events intervene in systems of governance at the local, national and international levels? What do mega-events tell us about the significance or the effectiveness of various forms of popular resistance to global power networks? What do mega-events tell us about the role of communications media in the early twenty first century political economy of global culture?
Skateboarding Mega-Events As Preparation for the 2020 Olympics: A Case Study of the Vans Park Series Championships in Shanghai
- Paul O’CONNOR, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
- Christopher Daniel GIAMARINO, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
This research provides a case study of the Vans Park Series (VPS) Skateboarding World Championship held in Shanghai in September 2017. Over the course of 14 days a concrete skatepark was constructed on Shanghai’s picturesque Bund, used for the event, and then demolished. The live stream of the competition was watched by 1.4 million people globally, making it small in comparison to other global sporting Mega-Events, but considerable regarding the sport of skateboarding. This study explores the significance of the new development of skateboarding Mega-Events. It highlights how VPS and Street League Skateboarding (SLS) have become the premier skateboarder controlled events that will feed, through the International Skateboarding Federation (ISF), qualifying skateboarders into the 2020 Olympic games. At the heart of this case study is the concern and control that skateboarders exert in communicating and persevering the values and ethics of skateboarding as it makes the final transition from a street subculture to an organised sport. In the process, many veteran skateboarders generate business and entrepreneurial opportunities tied to these transformations. The Shanghai site of the case study corresponds with the interest of Vans in generating new markets for the consumption of their products, and the importance that skateboarding holds for Chinese aspirations for gold medals in the Olympics. Thus, the study touches on the recruitment of a Chinese national skateboarding team made up of former child members of the Shaolin temple. Both politically and financially, collaboration with Asian skateboarders, Chinese business elites, and government officials provides additional insight to the organisation and impact of the event that extends beyond the spectacle of the Mega-Event.
Understanding Olympic-Related Developments from Activists and Local Resident Stakeholders: The Case of Mount Gariwang for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games
- Liv YOON, The University of British Columbia, Canada
In this presentation I explore the contested development of Mount Gariwang in South Korea – the former Class 1 Protected Area for Forest Genetic Resource Conservation – now transformed into the official alpine skiing venue for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. Specifically, I focus on the reactions of environmental and civic activist groups that protested the development, as well as the reactions of local residents near the mountain who were impacted by the development. This emphasis on the activists’ and locals’ perspectives complements existing research on controversial sport mega-event issues that tends to focus on narratives of elite decision makers and/or news-media. This is all the more important as there is a growing body of research that shows how sport mega-events have a significant (often detrimental) impact on the environment (e.g., Boykoff & Mascarenhas, 2016; Lenskyj, 1998, 2000; Karamichas, 2013; Wilson & Millington, 2015) – but a scarcity of research on perceptions of these problems as told by the stakeholders most directly involved and affected.
I report findings from interviews conducted with activists (n=14) and local residents (n=12) about: 1) how they made sense of news-media portrayals of the decisions and events around the development; 2) whether and how they were able to voice their opinions; and 3) what challenges they faced in resisting (or advocating for) the development. I also address the perceived short- and long-term implications (positive or negative) of the development from the perspectives of locals who live in varying vicinities to the mountain, as well as those of environmental and civic activists. Findings both inform, and are informed by, existing literature on environmental issues surrounding sports (mega-events), and draws on existing theories of environmental social movements (Yoo & Ku, 2015), ecological democracy (Dryzek, 2013), and concepts of de-politicization (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2014).
(Re)Presenting, Embodying & Consuming Rio De Janeiro: Narratives of Nation and the 2016 Olympic Games
- Amanda DE LISIO, Bournemouth University, Canada
- Michael SILK, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
- Bárbara S. DE ALMEIDA, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil
As one of the most visited cities in the Southern Hemisphere, sandwiched between world-renowned beaches and mountainous terrain, Rio has forever been in the midst of urban renewal—the literal city of the future. More recently, the entrepreneurial mode of governance pioneered in Barcelona, prior to the 1992 Summer Olympic event, influenced a wave of urban (re)development strategies enacted across 2016 Olympic host communities. The Strategic Plan of the City of Rio de Janeiro (Plano Estratégico da Cidade de Rio de Janeiro) named the (sport) mega-event as a desirable chance to restore tourism and attract foreign, as well as domestic investment (Torres Ribeiro, 2006). In this way, the mega-event offered an alternative avenue to “civilizing” the public sphere—e.g., whereas health and sanitation policies in the late 19th century were intended to “civilize” (those included in) the populace, the current planning approach has allowed foreign capital to dictate the terms of renewal (Caulfield, 2000; Meade, 2010). More than a mere catalyst, the hosting of an internationally-recognized mega-event—in this case Rio 2106—served as a crucial vehicle in urban image (re)construction (see also Broudehoux, 2017; Silk, 2002). Within this paper, we examine the manner in which Rio de Janeiro was (re)presented within national media and “official” Olympic documentation, and discuss how preferred, selected, local narratives were embodied, appropriated and mobilized in, and through, Olympic spectacle.
Contested Global Mega-Events, Para-Sport and Social Values: London, Toronto and Singapore
- Jill LE CLAIR, Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, United Kingdom
- Donna WONG, Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, United Kingdom
This paper examines attitudes towards para-athletes and their mega-sport events, in the context of UN and national Disability Rights legislation (Parent & Chappelet 2015). Mega-sport events both reflect and influence national values, and are inevitably the site of contestation within global capitalism. Results from a two-year study of attitudes after the London 2012 Paralympic Games and the Toronto 2015 Pan Am-Parapan American Games are presented, and an analysis of the heated public debates linked to Singapore’s policies and governance of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Research showed that in the UK some Paralympians were already celebrities because of mainstream and social media coverage, but at the same time there was conflict between those who objected to social welfare cutbacks for the disabled and those who supported the global corporate ‘economic development’ of London’s East End and billions of pounds spent on the Games themselves (Jackson et al 2015). The legal and social framework for the Toronto Parapan Am Games was the passage of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA 2005), and a commitment to greater accessibility, socially, and in the built environment, despite additional costs. There was less media coverage of all kinds for this second-tier event, but most participants ‘admired’ and were ‘inspired’ by para-athletes (Le Clair 2016).
Provision for disabled sport in Asia has not been as comprehensive as in the global north, so there are fewer participants from the global south in para-sport (Brittain 2017). Multi-medalist Paralympian swimmer Yip Pin Siew became the centre of national discourse over the difference in the treatment and recognition of disabled athletes in Singapore. This led to changes in para-sport policies and governance (Disability Sports Master Plan 2016).
Session: Sport, Health and Violence. Methodological Challenges.
Wednesday, 18 July 2018: 10:30-12:20
RC54 The Body in the Social Sciences (host committee)
The current trend in health studies is to consider health in a complex and dynamic rather than static perspective. In this view, health is the result of a constant interaction between the individual and his environment, it is no longer considered only as the absence of disease but as a resource for everyday life in which the individual’s role is active. In that case, the notion of health capability explain the conditions that affect health and one’s ability to make choices. Health and sports can be considered as indicators of current individual and global health condition, and as a mirrors of societies’ transformations. For this reason, as sociologists, the analysis of health and sports/physical activity can be a key to analyse changes in social interaction and collective representations. Similar things could be said about the concept of violence, mobilizing now interdisciplinary, complex and multifactorial approaches, and crossing the concepts of health and sports at different levels.
To have a comprehensive understanding of these phenomena, we should consider a broad range of dimensions of the health condition, sports and violence of both the overall population and the individual. We should open to an interdisciplinary view of these topics, calling into question innovative methodological tools/approaches. In order to contribute to these streams of research and to open new horizons for further investigation, we invite papers opening to an interdisciplinary sociology-based approach, moving innovative qualitative, quantitative or mixed methodologies, aimed at understanding the relationships/interactions between sports/physical activity, health and violence.
Brain Trauma As Constitutive Condition: Beyond the Event of Traumatic Brain Injury
- Kathryn HENNE, University of Waterloo, Canada
In light of high-profile lawsuits involving professional sport leagues in North America, the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) have attracted significant public attention. News media regularly features reports of concussed athletes, speculation about the health risks of contact sport participation, scientific findings of degenerative brain disease, and the development of injury prevention methods. While these developments mark a shift in public consciousness, public discourse often overstates scientific findings about the effects of concussions and presents simplistic depictions of brain trauma. This paper steps back from popularized depictions of TBI to consider how participants navigate brain trauma, thus offering alternative narratives about experiences of—and with—brain injury. Rather than focusing on specific events resulting in TBI and their effects, this analysis looks at affected participants’ descriptions of how they navigate and manage everyday life. Drawing on autoethnographic, interview and (inter)active observational data, it illuminates key features of brain trauma as a lived condition in which multiple layers of violence and trauma may be relevant. Further, many participants come to occupy an interstitial space between risk, injury and disability in ways that depart from popular discourses and their renderings of the TBI. The paper concludes by reflecting on how our understandings of brain injury and its effects might shift if we focus the constitutive elements that inform its materialization and lived experience.
Bodies As Libraries of Bioparts/ Sociology of the Body Meets Life Engineering
- Eva SLESINGEROVA, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Human bodies are treated at the level of molecules, genes, DNA, and cells in the current biotechnological context. The focus of life science research has shifted from genome description, DNA mapping, and DNA sequencing to active and profound reprogramming, making synthetic life on the genetic and molecular levels. At the same time, our bodies exist in liminal spaces between biology and technology. Bodies on both the material and symbolical levels embody the current cultural and social trend in which biology becomes technological and technology becomes biological. The body is seen as a kind of library filled with various bio-devices, body-like entities, biobricks, and synthetically fabricated genetic parts. Taking advantage of the analytical approaches of contemporary anthropology and the sociology of life and the body, the presentation shows the outcomes and results of fieldwork conducted in biological and IVF laboratories in the Czech Republic where the various technologies of molecular biology are used. The paper particularly focuses on life engineering technologies such as repairing DNA, CRISP/cas9, and PGD. The views, perspectives, and attitudes of scientists and laboratory technicians will be analyzed and presented with special regard for the concepts of body and embodiment.
Session: Contemporary Issues in Sociology of Sport. Part I
Wednesday, 18 July 2018: 17:30-19:20
Session Organizer: Christine DALLAIRE, University of Ottawa, Canada
This session invites scholars to explore new and emerging topics of research in the sociology of sport. Papers can also revisit or propose to update our sociological thinking about older questions and themes about sport through innovative theoretical analysis or new and creative empirical evidence. In short, what are current issues in sport and how can we enhance our understanding of these issues through sociological analysis.
Cultural Leadership of Local Surfers in South Korea: Sustainability for Business or Community?
- Sun-Yong KWON, Department of Physical Education, Republic of Korea
Surfing has witnessed remarkable growth during the recent two decades in South Korea. This paper explores the South Korea’s recent surfing boom to analyze ways in which the Western countercultural leisure pursuit has been actively embraced and localized in one of the country’s three major surfing scenes – YangYang County, Gangwon Province. First, the process and features of the regional surfing community development are investigated. Second, particular focus is given to the process of cultural leadership formation and relevant controversies, associated with the localized surfing development in the region. An ethnographic field work has been conducted for data collection. It is noted that the regional surfing community has been organized around South Korea’s unique domestic surfing tourism for non-local recreational and novice surfers who tend to maintain their surf club membership identity. Established local surfers are predominantly local surf shop owners – also surf club managers who have successfully mobilized hegemonic cultural leadership for the regional surfing community development. There have been increasing tensions and conflicts between the established local surfers and those newcomers seeking for surfing business opportunities. The primary concern of the local surfers is the sustainability of the regional surfing community where they have maintained community leadership for establishing ‘desirable’ local surfing culture. It appears that local surfers’ cultural leadership is justified by the formation of a particular version of localism and the establishment of community network. The localized development processes of localism and community network will be further analyzed and discussed.
Looking within the Bay-Area Skate Scene: A Unique Example of Place-Making and the Repurposing of Space
- Missy WRIGHT, CSU East Bay, USA
- ZáNean MCCLAIN, CSU East Bay, USA
- Matthew ATENCIO, CSU East Bay, USA
- Becky BEAL, CSU East Bay, USA
Skateboarding’s rise in popularity is in part due to the growing adult presence that hoists new interests and consequences upon an activity that was once considered an activity with elements of non-conformity, freedom, and creativity. Our research has focused on the fascinating and complex San Francisco Bay Area skate scene; once distinguished by its “skate and destroy” reputation, we now see how neoliberalism has played a significant role in redefining this skateboarding culture, with significant investments on the part of families, governments, and social enterprise groups.
There is much diversity within the Bay Area skate scene, with this paper focusing on how one city came together to repurpose space and develop place that fostered social, cultural and emotional attachment for their community members around the sport of skateboarding within the Bay Area in California, USA (Johnson, Glover, William & Stewart, 2014).
The city of San Jose, dubbed as the Capital of Silicon Valley, simultaneously uses ideologies around public health and at-risk youth culture to construct numerous skate parks. A unique set of socio-cultural and economic circumstances sharply implicated how skate parks were being conceptualized and managed by the city government. We completed over 30 hours of observations at two skate parks, and conducted interviews with 20 individuals who were parents, youth, and adults associated with skateboard programming. Different strategies for placemaking for different neighborhoods. We examined why these strategies were used in these different neighborhoods’ skate parks. In one case, the skate park was used to brand the city as innovative. And, in turn, place-making was used in ethnic minority neighborhoods as “redemptive” strategies. We discuss the implications of these strategies
Sport As Culture: Sports Participation and Styles of Cultural Consumption in Canada
- Adam GEMAR, Durham University, United Kingdom
Despite the prevalence of sport in contemporary societies, academics know little about how sports participation fits into broader cultural lifestyles. We know much more about other cultural domains, such as music. While Bourdieu’s social theories are most frequently applied to sports participation, other theories of sports participation, such as omnivorism, remain under researched (Widdop and Cutts, 2014). However, even fewer explorations seek to place sports participation in the wider cultural context of consumption. This study examines cultural consumption and sports participation in Canada to further understand how patterns of sports consumption fit into these broader cultural lifestyles. By investigating how each of Canada’s five most popular team and individual sports are consumed, it forms conclusions about the cultural lifestyles of these consumers, by which prevailing theories of cultural consumption can be assessed with regard to sport. Through a Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of the General Social Survey (GSS) of Canada, and accompanying regression modelling, this paper finds that intense cultural omnivores and pop culture consumers are by far the most likely participants in the five team sports (baseball, basketball, ice hockey, soccer, volleyball). The five individual sports are much more widely dispersed along the spectrum of cultural engagement. However, four of the individual sports (tennis, downhill skiing, cycling, swimming) map most strongly onto intense omnivorism, while golf maps onto more high-brow consuming patterns of cultural behaviour.
Mobility As Process: Migrant Agency, Gender, and Race in Sports Labour Migration
- Mari ENGH, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
In this presentation I will draw on empirical material from a case study of the migrations of Nigerian women footballers, to pose arguments about how to approach athletic migrations from the Postcolonial South to the Global North, and the role that migrants themselves play in the production and maintenance of sport migrations. The presentation argues for the need for analytical approaches to sports labour migration that do not rely on linear models with narrow definitions of success and desirable destinations. What happens to analyses of sport labour mobilities if we start from the recognition that migrants do not have stable and fixed aspirations regarding their professional and migratory careers? In this presentation I will suggest that sports labour migration might be better analysed through paying attention to the processes through which mobility is produced, re-produced and sustained. In this, migrants are not inanimate objects or commodities that are moved by external forces alone. Rather, their performances, and the work they put into sustaining employment is crucial in producing particular trajectories and maintaining migratory careers. This work, however, happens within particular contexts, and is shaped by local and transnational regimes of gender, race and class. Hence, it is not just the desires and efforts of migrants that affect their for transnational careers, but also regimes and ideas, in the Global North, about the bodies, talents, and dreams of labour migrants from the Postcolonial South.
Living to Coach? or Coaching to Live? the Commodification of Youth Sport
- Richard SHEPTAK, Baldwin Wallace University, USA
- Sam BELKIN, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Sports fields, open grass, and gravel areas, once occupied by children at play, are now part of a space that can be described as the ‘youth sport industrial complex’. In this space, the child-centered activity of random sports play has been replaced by an adult-centered, rule-bound, and organized system of training that comes with a hefty price tag; what we refer to as professional youth coaching. Even within organized youth sport, the role of coaches has shifted. In order to justify the hefty price tag, coaches are now forced to focus on filling rosters, recruitment of athletes, winning at all costs, and maximizing profits which detracts from the emphasis on young athlete development, respect for the game, and sportsmanship. In fact, one could argue that youth coaches have become collectors of talent instead of developers of talent. Further, in a space once filled by community based recreation programs, private for-profit commercialized entities have risen to create a place in which parents can fulfill their need for vicarious competition and winning. This autoethnographic study analyzes over 25 years of coaching in youth soccer in the United States and delineates the shift from, what the lead researcher observes to be, player-centered coaching to a profit-centered coaching model based on selling deception and false hope. As such, the paper navigates the lead researcher’s attempt to make meaning of his own personal biography within the historical and contemporary context that has seen shifting patterns in the landscape of youth coaching. Additionally, using Norbert Elias’ ideas of figurations as a framework, the research explores a new currency of power and shifting chains of interdependencies in the coach/player, coach/parent, parent/player, and parent/parent relationships and examines the effects that these changes have had, and still have, on the traditional teaching and mentoring role of the youth coaches.
Session: Contemporary Issues in Sociology of Sport. Part II
Friday, 20 July 2018: 08:30-10:20
Session Organizer: Christine DALLAIRE, University of Ottawa, Canada
Do Politics Belong in Football? the Case of Celtic F.C.
- Maureen MCBRIDE, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
In recent years, debates surrounding the question of whether politics can be legitimately expressed in the context of football have been reinvigorated in Scottish society. In 2016, the Scottish national side, along with the English national side, were fined by FIFA for displaying the remembrance poppy symbol on their strips in a World Cup qualifier, in breach of a rule which prohibits ‘political, religious or commercial messages at football matches’. Football supporters are subject to similar restrictions, particularly in Scotland, where the contentious Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (2012) Act criminalises, among other behaviours, forms of political expression.
This paper draws on my recently-completed doctoral research: a qualitative exploration of the meanings and experiences of football supporters in the West of Scotland. Through semi-structured interviewing and ethnographic observations, the research uncovered binary representations of football supporters as ‘roughs’ and ‘respectables’, as supporters for whom football is a site for alternative political expression are routinely marked out and treated differently from ‘respectable’ supporters by the authorities. This paper focuses on participants’ narratives regarding how they internalise and in some cases resist these stereotypes, reclaiming football as a space for class solidarities and alternative political expression. The paper focuses specifically on a sub-section of supporters of Celtic Football Club who engage in expressions of support for Irish Republicanism. It explores how their football affiliation is bound up in their understandings of their national, ethnic, social class, and political identities. Given the current political context, as Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom is increasingly insecure, participants’ narratives offer an important insight into how complex identities are made sense of in a time of significant political, socio-economic and cultural change.
Endurance, Risk and Sleepless Mobilities in Adventure Sport
- Martha BELL, Media Associates, New Zealand
Ultra-endurance, long distance, cross-country sport practices that require racing through the night are now challenging the temporal and spatial mobilities of the sport product and the authentic expedition by embracing non-stop travelling. Adventure racers wear portable headlamps as part of everyday race gear, whether mountain biking, paddling, canyoning, trail running, climbing or on snow, and expect night-time racing instead of camping. This paper examines the emergent phenomenon of competitive sport at night and raises questions about the risks and implications of such 24-hour corporeal mobilities for enforcing sleepless travel as a coercive mobility norm. It then turns to the political economy of adventure sport involving team sponsorship by equipment manufacturers to test and improve outdoor products. It notes the recent extension of ‘traditional’ racing in the dark, such as the mountain marathon and the adventure race, to new practices of marketing a single race as occurring only in the dark. Where nightfall was once used as an enforced reststop in a dark zone of safety, dark space is now framed as a limitation which event sponsors overcome with their own product innovations. The paper concludes that adventure sport is being incorporated into the metabolic spaces of the night-time economy.
Kin Games? the Complicity of Universities in the Depoliticization of Health in Sport
- Parissa SAFAI, York University, Canada
Scholarship on the interconnections between sport, medicine and health has steadily grown in the sociology of sport and physical cultural studies in the past few decades such that there is now a (somewhat) defined body of knowledge on the interconnections between sport, medicine and health. Scholars from all across the world have turned their attention towards problematizing the commonplace assertion that ‘sport is good for one’s health’ and contextualizing the sport-health paradox against a backdrop of larger politico-economic, historical and socio-cultural forces. This established and growing body of knowledge is very encouraging for our disciplinary area more broadly, and is also notable since most of the scholars who have contributed to this body of knowledge are situated in academic departments that are management-centric, performance-oriented and/or which prioritize the applied sport sciences. In these departments, it is not uncommon to see scholars who criticize the health-compromising nature of sport systems working down the hall from colleagues focused on transforming the human sporting body into (an ever better) performance machine. The technocratic reconstruction of university physical education departments into Kinesiology, Human Kinetics, Kinesiology and Health Sciences or whatever mutation or combination of like words, as well as the alignment with and ascendance of health promotion, is not a new phenomenon and many have written about the specialization of academic disciplines within Kinesiology, and the transformation of physical education departments into units that de-emphasize the philosophical, ethical, social and cultural study of sport. This paper continues in this vein by focusing on the tensions for researchers, instructors, and students, with specific attention to the Canadian university context, that arise around the de-/politicization of health in sport in academic units that have embraced or are embracing “technicist [tendencies]” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985, p. 197, as cited in Macintosh & Whitson, 1990, p. 134).
Global Research of Physical and Sports Activity: Problems of Methodology and Prospects of Development
- Olesia KYRYLENKO, 2010, Ukraine
- Miroslav DUTCHAK, 2018, Ukraine
Sociological measurement of the level of physical and sports activity of the population has developed primarily in the developed countries of the world, such as the US, Great Britain, France etc.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, first international studies of physical and sports activity in the territory of the European Union by the COMPASS project and Eurobarometer were conducted. In 2007, the ISSP conducted an international study “Leisure time and sports” in 34 countries in different continents.
A significant contribution to the development of the methodology for the study of physical activity was made by WHO experts who developed the International Physical Activity Questionnaire and the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (2002).
The scientific potential that has been achieved as well as the development of modern information technology have created the prerequisites for transition to global studies of sports and physical activity. Such global studies presuppose integration of sociologists within the framework of a special global scientific project supported by ISA, ISSA, IOC, UN, UNESCO, WHO etc. Preparation and implementation of such a project includes: development of a unified methodology for global measurements of the level, forms, factors of sports and physical activity of the population of the countries of the world; the use of advanced information and computer technologies in the collection, processing and access to the results of the study.
The experience of global sociological researches and Internet surveys, that have been carried out during the last decades by Gallup Organization, the UN, confirms the prospects of studying sports and physical activity on a planetary scale. This reveals new opportunities in the field of cross-national and cross-temporal analysis of the level, trends and problems of sports development in all countries of the world.
Cannabis Use Amongst Elite University Athletes
- Alec SKILLINGS, University of Alberta, Canada
Cannabis, the arcane yet widely enjoyed resinous psychoactive plant, is presently undergoing a period of legal resurgence throughout North America. Eight states in the U.S. have passed bills to legalize recreational cannabis in the last five years, and in the summer of 2018 the recreational use of cannabis will be legal in Canada nationwide. Cannabis is the most popularly used illicit drug in Canada, and the most recent surveys indicate that university athletes in North America use cannabis. However, these studies go no further than to show that elite university athletes do, indeed, consume cannabis. Presently, the prohibition of cannabis in sports is due to its legal status. Cannabis’ illegality puts its use in conflict with the ‘spirit of sport’, as defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). However, the rapidly changing legality of cannabis is now calling into question this rationale for its prohibition from sport. Many professional athletes such as Ross Rebagliati and Ricky Williams have advocated for the use of cannabis in various capacities within sport, however it remains to be seen whether the current policies regarding cannabis use will change within sport.
This presentation will discuss the cannabis use of elite Canadian university athletes. How do elite university athletes incorporate cannabis into their athletic lives? How do elite university athletes negotiate the stigmas associated with cannabis use and the perceived benefits of consumption? How will the changes of federal legislation (The Cannabis Act) impact the cannabis use of university athletes. Through qualitative interviews with several elite university athletes these questions will be answered and the emerging discourse of cannabis in sport will be directed through the athlete’s perspective.
Session: Sport, Bodies and Identity. Part I
Thursday, 19 July 2018: 15:30-17:20
Session Organizer: Brent MCDONALD, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
This session welcomes papers that engage with research into sport, the body and identity. The body is a central vehicle from which to engage with the sociological significance of sport. As such research may examine the representation of bodies, or utilize the body as a methodological tool. Identity may be considered both individual and collective and draw on local, national, and transnational contexts. In particular papers that consider the variously contradictory, transformative, and reproductive ways sport intersects with identity are encouraged.
Bodies on the Spot. Commercialization and Performative Rationalization Among Italian Runners
- Roberta SASSATELLI, University of Milan, Italy
- Fabio Massimo LO VERDE, University of Palermo, Italy
This paper addresses the interface between sport and fitness, considering that commercialization has worked in two directions: while competitive, professional sport is becoming a global media phenomenon, with increasingly global and yet fragmented audiences, ordinary sport practice is being individualized in the Global North and shaped by the logic of therapeutic leisure. The latter has given way to the diffusion of a variety of active leisure activities aiming at providing individual consumers meaningful experiences of body transformation as well as health and fitness Apps apparently extending consumers’ self-surveillance capacities. Based on semi-structured interviews with runners in two Italian cities, from the North and the South of the country, we explore how running practices and relevant Apps function as commercial disciplinary body techniques. Looking at runners’ fitness and sport scripts and exploring how they use Apps to assist in training, we show that these devices take on some of the functions previously carried out by trainers, both further individualizing sporting and fitness practices, and allowing for the construction of relevant online communities. We analyze the variety of fitness and sport scripts collected on the backdrop of the broader discourse on active leisure, and consider how these interface with commercialization and market culture. We further discuss the emotional code which are deployed by runners in managing their running practices and illustrate their increasingly rationalized modes of relation with their bodies. The paper proposes that spectacularizing and individualizing self-surveillance are the staple of running practices as monitored through running Apps, and shows how gamification of practice situates running at the crossroad of fitness and sport practice colluding towards the increasing performative rationalization of active leisure consumers
Diaspora, Sporting Bodies and Aesthetic Formation: The Experiences of Dutch Somalis Examined
- Ramon SPAAIJ, Victoria University, Australia
- Jora BROERSE, Institute of Health and Sport, Victoria University, Australia
This paper builds on the concept of aesthetic formation to examine the sensorial practices through which diasporic imaginations become tangible, experienced as ‘real’, and ‘felt in the bones’. The authors interpret cultural forms such as sport as a critical space for the embodied aesthetic forms through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for identification and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on a transnational community-based sports event, the Amsterdam Futsal Tournament (AFT), the paper discusses how Somali diasporism is mediated, becomes tangible and how it strengthens the embodiment in subjects who participate in this event. The authors conclude that these sensorial modes can simultaneously elicit multiple forms and scales of belonging that also foster a sense of integration and belonging to the nation
Marginalized Youths` Constructions of Identity in the Context of Self-Organized Sports: An Ethnographic Exploration at Urban Football Grounds
- Johannes MÜLLER, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen, Germany, Germany
In public and political debates young ethnic minority men are commonly labelled as a ‘problem group’ and in scientific discourses researchers attest them difficulties with identity development. Taking into account that young ethnic minority men are primarily keen on sports in informal contexts, the study focuses on the self-organized football activities of underprivileged, poorly educated boys from culturally traditional migrant families and aims at exploring the various meanings of sport for these youths with regard to their constructions of identity. Based on semi-structured interviews, ethnographic conversations and (participant) observations the study investigates the narrative as well as (unintentional) nonverbal constructions and presentations of identity. Findings show that the 13 interviewed and observed young men suffer from spoiled identities and negative self-images due to educational failure and perceived inferior social positions. Furthermore, the material reveals that the boys see sporting activities as a legitimate cultural sphere, where excellent skills are recognized and valued by their families and friends, but also in society as whole. It is concluded that for these youths – due to default of (legitimate) alternatives – sports are the most important (and maybe the only) practice for experiencing competence and success, allowing to compensate for perceived failure in other social domains, most notably, the educational domain. The urban football ground thus can be described as a ‘counter world’ to the lifeworld of school and becomes a place for coping and curing various threats to identity.
The Many Faces of Rodeo Sport: Intersectional, International and Cross-Cultural Comparison
- Miriam ADELMAN, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
- Cristian Carla BERNAVA, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Rodeo sport has a long and complicated history. Often explained as “the only sport descending directly from work routines” – in this case, those of the American ‘cowboy’ and the Latin American ‘vaquero’ (vaqueiro) – its popularity does not cease to grow the world over, precisely as the context of its birth recedes in time (albeit not in the popular imagination). Furthermore, it is a sport that engages animal and human bodies in complex, diverse and much-mythologized interaction, whether in conflict (as in bull and bronc riding) or partnership’ (i.e. the ‘horse-human team’ in barrel racing and calf roping). This paper is based on comparative work on contemporary Brazilian and North American rodeo and the apparent counterpoint of two of its current tendencies: on the one hand, its expansion as part of what Maguire has referred to as the Global Sport Media complex – as exemplified by the multi-million dollar North American PBR (Professional Bull Riders) events – and on the other, the often less business-oriented and even community-driven construction by participants who reclaim new visibility and opportunity for their historic but less recognized presence in rodeo and equestrian cultures, often mobilizing around racial-ethnic or gender/sexuality axes. As part of a broader comparative project, we focus here on two regional Brazilian rodeo cultures – the southern Brazilian Gaucho (campeiro) and the central Brazilian country rodeo circuits. We examine similarities and differences in the social origin of participants and within the sporting practices and the discursive strategies used to justify or gain support for their particular rodeo circuits; key issues that come to the forefront include constructions of masculinity/femininity, the re-signifying of rural and national/regional identity & ‘heritage’ and recent conflicts over uses of animal bodies in rodeo sport.
Development of Athletic Identity in Elite Adolescent Athletes
- Naveen YARLAGADDA, University of Texas at Austin, USA
- Vijayanthimala KODALI, Mahatma Gandhi National Institute of Research and Social Action, India
Approximately 3/4ths of American children participate in organized sport. The large majority of these children quit by age 13, but those that stay are left with a much stronger athletic identity than their non-athletic counterparts. Many of these athletes stay for various reasons– the benefits of sport are numerous— but the most prominent reason athletes continue to compete when their counterparts do not is athletic success. Athletic success has a high correlation with the formation of identity. At elite levels, the athletic identities of adolescents becomes increasingly connected with their respective personal identities, and as such, become more exclusive.
An exclusive athletic identity has many drawbacks. Adolescents who base their identities primarily around athletics run the risk of practicing dangerous behaviours, such as overtraining or using performance enhancing drugs. In comparison to their counterparts, elite athletes spend considerably less time engaging in social behaviors within the framework of general society. Instead, much of their social interaction occurs in elite, exclusive athletic subcultures. This limited exposure to classical society stunts the behavioral development of adolescents. This paper looks to determine the extent to which exclusive athletic identities stunts social growth among adolescents, if it does at all.
Session: Sport, Bodies and Identity. Part II
Thursday, 19 July 2018: 17:30-19:20
Session Organizer: Brent MCDONALD, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
The Local Belongings, National Identities and Global Flows in Turkish Football: The Case of Eskişehirspor Fans
- Emre GÖKALP, Anadolu University, Turkey
Industrial football, which has been neo-liberalized and increasingly articulated to consumption culture, seems to be a field on which almost all features of globalisation appears. Historically, the increasing cultural complexity of football as a substantial agent of local/national identity reflects the globalisation more. Inevitable consequences of the globalisation from global football trade and the fan culture to the economical organisations of the football clubs are also seen in football extraordinarily.
Does the globalization process weaken the position of football as a fundamental source of local and national belongings or does the globalization in football also make localization possible concurrently with homogenization at global level? To what extent do the earlier boundaries between local, national and global become vague as football increasingly becomes globalized? In the light of these questions, this paper aims to discuss how and in which way do the global and local dynamics transform the world of meaning of supporters along with industrialization and globalization of football. Based on a sociological fieldwork conducted on Eskişehirspor [Turkish football club located in the middle Anatolian city of Eskişehir] fans (1,117 questionnaires were used and 40 in-depth interviews were conducted in the research) this paper argues that the dialectic between the globalization of football, local belongings and nationalism preserves its importance in the case of Eskişehirspor, although it seems to be complicated and contradictory. [A high degree of sentimental attachment to the team, a strong feeling of a sense of a loyalty not only to the city’s identity but also to Turkish nationalism have always been regarded as the one of the distinctiveness of the Eskişehirspor fans in Turkey.] The paper maintains that the simultaneous coexistence of the globalizing football culture and the nationalism(s) will continue to widespread in the Turkish case as seen around the globe.
Social Inclusion, Body and Identity in Multiculturalism Contexts. the Impact of Football on the Integration of Foreign Asylum Seekers
- Loredana TALLARITA, University Kore of Enna, Italy
Football can be considered an amazing space of opportunity to built a cultural identity because it allows young immigrants to get out of isolation and to socialize with the youth of the host country. Football is the most popular sport in the world and it is the dream of many yang foreigners living in developing countries. It is a social integration tool that can facilitates mutual knowledge, allows the diversity and the uniqueness; to raise awareness of the rules; of companions and opponents and facilitates the building of self-consciousness, cultural identity and body. Socialization pathways and co-operation between italian youth and immigrant people evolve inside the football team and consciously mature, despite cultural and ethnic differences, the sport improve the concept of brotherhood. Full integration is achieved through the recognition of common values and is not confined to sporting practice itself but flows into continuous relationships with social capital (Putnam 2000, Coleman 1988) of the sports environment.The purpose of the research is to analyze, through a case study (Glaser & Strauss 1967, Yin 2013) identified the Sicily, the effectiveness of educational intervention promoted by sporting practice, related to the social capital circulating around football, in order to understand the potential of this sport: what a possible path to the full integration of immigrants arrived in Sicily from developing countries through football.
Jerseys Off: An Investigation of Basketball Players and Body Commodification
- Sam BELKIN, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
- Richard SHEPTAK, Baldwin Wallace University, USA
From amateur wannabes to professional superstars, the stereotypical mental picture of basketball players in the United States is intertwined with tattoos. Whether purposeful or happenstance, the prevalence of highly visible tattoos in the NBA and college basketball world has been growing rapidly. With the increased prominence of tattoos, fans in the United States are commodifying the tattooed bodies of basketball players leading to their objectification. Furthermore, the tattooed portions of player’s bodies become commodified as objects of their own. As both whole bodies and individual tattooed body parts, the commodified body takes on meanings associated with the experiences of those interpreting them. These commodified tattooed bodies and tattooed body parts combine the idea of the Maussian symbolically charged gift, due to the symbolism the body adopts while necessitating reciprocity, and the Marxian notion of a good. In this study, we discuss how the commodification of the tattooed body and body parts of professional and collegiate basketball players are symbolically charged objects that can be bought, sold, and traded. Furthermore, using symbolic interactionism and Norbert Elias’ ideas as a framework, the study investigates how tattooed bodies act as commodities influencing marketing, identity, performance of masculinity, and the chains of interdependency inherent in the player/player, player/team, and player/fan social structures.
The Body Perception and Coming of Age in the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics
- Ivana ALEIXO, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Myrian NUNOMURA, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) is a demanding sport, both from a technical and aesthetic point of view. To achieve success, there is early involvement and intensive training since childhood. Authors have related this reality and the difficulties of gymnasts when they perceive themselves as “older”. We questioned gymnasts on the representations of the body from their own perception, in order to understand the body models prevalent in this sport. The aim of the study was to gain insight into the body’s perception of the age and its relationship with the coach, the training, and the family throughout the sports career. Currently, there are several studies on how to maintain the ideal physical conditioning, the coach-athlete relationship, the age-related beliefs and performance. The present study was generated by the project “Coming of age: Towards best practice in artistic gymnastics” (Kerr, Barker-Ruchti, Schubring, Cervin, Nunomura, 2013), which aim is to explore the experiences of older gymnasts and the factors associated to the prolonged sporting career. Seven Portuguese gymnasts with international experience were interviewed. The semi-structured interview focused on the oral history approach, and the thematic analysis was used for data treatment. It was identified that the main influences are the perception of matured age; the passage through moments that combine individual factors with adjustment requirements and their own characteristics; social relations with colleagues and coach. The experience of being “older” gymnasts helps to understand how particular contexts happen and thus develop a new stage of the career. The identification of body perception with the onset of age could encourage alternative ways of coaching WAG and improve the meanings that competitive sport could assume for older athletes and thus promote the prolongation of the sports career.
Illegible Genders in the Change Room: Improving Transgender Inclusivity in Sporting Spaces
- Ali GREEY, University of Toronto, Canada
For lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgendered and intersex (LGBQTI) bodies, the change room is often a space fraught with vulnerability. Scholarship suggests that discomfort in the change room represents the most significant barrier to this community’s inclusion in sport (Hargie, 2017; Keogh, 2006; Whittle, 2007). While several scholars propose gender-neutral alternatives to men’s/ women’s change rooms (Cavanaugh, 2010; Sykes, 2011), little literature examines how this existing infrastructure can be adapted to improve accessibility for LGBQTI participants.
My research examines the Change Room Project (CRP) as a model for mediating gender differentiated spaces to improve inclusivity for ambiguously gendered bodies (Fusco, forthcoming). My presentation draws on an autoethnographic account of my observations visiting change rooms around the world as an androgynous athlete competing for the Canadian women’s boxing team. I will illustrate the CRP, and the phenomenon that I observed in the change room where it was displayed in 2015. My presentation will designate significant time for interactive discussion, I am particularly interested in panel/ audience members’ explorations into how intersectional aspects of identity (eg. masculinity/ femininity, sexuality, being racialized, (dis)ability and body size) affect experiences and capacity for claiming space in the change room
Session: Media and Sport. Part I
Friday, 20 July 2018: 15:30-17:20
Session Organizer: Brent MCDONALD, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
The relationship between the mass media and sport has a long and rich history as a topic of sociological inquiry. However the rapid proliferation of new media, and the continued concentrated ownership of old media necessitates ongoing and novel research into the way the media and sport interact. This session welcomes papers that consider the media and sport in relation to a range of themes including: advertising and marketing; representations of gender, race, and national identity; political economy and ideology; and new media.
Trivialisation, Fetishization and New Modes of Sexualisation: The (re-)Constitution of the Paralympic Athlete
- Michael SILK, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
- Dan JACKSON, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
- Emma PULLEN, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
This presentation draws on early findings from a large-scale, multi-methodological, project that focuses on the media production and consumption of the Paralympic Games and the impact this has on addressing current political challenges of equality for, and representation of, disability. The findings are drawn from an integrative methodological approach that combined elite media para-sport production interviewing, multiple and theoretically informed textual readings of Channel 4’s (the UK’s Paralympic broadcaster) Rio 2016 Paralympic broadcast content, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with the general public, document analysis, and, analysis of archival materials and footage. In the context of the rapid commercialisation of the Paralympic games and the power of corporate media in constructing social realities, our analysis explores the ways in which neoliberal inclusionary strategies manifest specific forms of representation and whether such representations provide sites of empowerment for everyday people living with disabilities. In so doing, we contribute to on-going theoretical debates (and media practice) around mediasports celebrated and idealized embodiments of neoliberal economies: healthy, fit, sexual, hetero-normative, and attractive bodies (Andrews, 2006; Miller, 2001). With the antithesis being the pathologisation of ageing, death & disability (Turner, 1988), our discussion focuses on the increased hyper-commercialisation and hyper-visibility of disability—via Paralympic coverage—and is suggestive of movement in the representation of disability. Indeed, previous research conducted has highlighted the ubiquity of the ‘supercrip’ or ‘superhuman’, representing the para-athlete as the self-made hero, technologically productive / functional, but largely asexual, accommodated within limited modes of neoliberal regimes. Our data however, suggest a nuanced shift in these dominant narratives, especially around the increasing sexualisation, eroticisation and devised bodily aesthetics of the para-athlete. We suggest this shift has important implications for representing alternative modes of embodiment and empowerment, understanding para-sport narratives as sites of resistance, and with respect to the ‘boundaries’ of neoliberal inclusionary practices.
Rethinking Football Hooliganism from an International Perspective: The Case Study of England and Russia
- Jonathan SLY, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
The World Cup summer of 2018 seems an appropriate place to revisit the issue of football fan violence in sport. Despite being a topic which has received plentiful academic commentary throughout the social sciences, recent events in the 21st century illuminate ever-broadening gaps within the predominantly Western European based literature which require further sociological exploration. Hooliganism is a global phenomenon that can be seen to mutate and adapt alongside changes related to both the sport of football and to the particular societies in which the game is played. This research looks at the development of contemporary hooligan cultures in the countries of England and Russia, and uses the case study of the spectator violence at the UEFA European Championship tournament in France in 2016 to demonstrate what can happen when two extremely different but high-profile fan subcultures collide on the international stage.
The English and Russian case not only highlights the potential problem of sports fan violence at International Mega-Events, but also illustrates how key differences can form between football hooligan subcultures globally. This paper uses observational data from the Euro 2016 tournament and the Russian and English domestic leagues, interviews with English and Russian hooligans, and secondary data analysis of mainstream and internet media coverage of football hooliganism in both nations, to explore issues such as differences in contemporary hooligan identities, the impact of internet technologies on hooligan cultures, the role of nationalism, and the dissimilar ideological frameworks that hooligan groups create in order to legitimise their sports-related violence. Ultimately, this project aims to add to academic literature on this topic, to challenge the commonly held assumptions within the social sciences that hooligan cultures are the same globally, and to provide a rethinking of the use of the label ‘football hooliganism’ from an international perspective.
Here Is a Place for You/Know Your Place: Understanding Representations of the Female Body in Fitness Advertising
- Carly DRAKE, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada
- Scott RADFORD, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada
The media landscape is one realm in which gender equality remains elusive. For example, images of women shared in fitness media negate women’s athletics and sexualize female athletes, treating their [ideal] bodies as objects to be gazed upon (e.g., Hardin et al., 2005; Wasylkiw et al., 2009; Cranmer et al. 2014). Research typically considers editorial and advertising images in fitness media as a single unit. However, advertising merits separate inquiry because it educates consumers (Sandage, 1972) by shaping social norms and values (McCracken, 1986) using medium-specific objectives and tools (e.g., sales and sales pitches).
Given the apparent salience of the body in sport culture, and the way in which running media is said to present a gendered, aged, and classed version of reality (Abbas, 2004), this study asks: How might we understand how female bodies are represented in fitness advertisements in mainstream and women’s running media? A critical reading of advertisements in the January/February 2017 issues of three running magazines reveals that the bodies and related messages advertising shares act as “biopedagogy” that provides implicit and explicit information and directives about how a body should look (Rail & Lafrance, 2009; Fullagar, 2009).
This biopedagogy creates a place in sport culture for female readers but reminds them they may only occupy a certain place. To this end, advertisements function in three ways. Specifically, they (1) prescribe and normalize a bodily obsession centred around nutrition and sport science; (2) highlight white, slim bodies without showing the effort that goes into shaping those bodies; and (3) infantilize women and trivialize their participation in sport. In reconciling these interrelated but often competing messages, this study argues that fitness advertisements in running media attempt to empower women to seek the benefits promised through athletics but withhold information that can help them safely reach their goals.
A Comparison of the Japanese Sports Blogosphere and Newspapers
- Mitsunori OHHASHI, Kurume University, Japan
The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of online and traditional media sports coverage by comparing the content of blog posts to newspapers. Previous internet-based studies have demonstrated research significance, however, the research has not examined the convergence of the “virtual” and “real’” user experience (Millington and Wilson, 2010). Additionally, Meraz (2009) pointed out that further study is needed to analyze “traditional-media-to-citizen media influence.” Drawing from the content analysis of daily newspaper and sports blog coverage of a Japanese high school baseball tournament, this study focuses on the virtual sports context. The online coverage of a Japanese high school baseball tournament was identified in sports fan blogs. The blogs, Sportsnavi plus, were published on Sportnavi.com, a sports fan website which includes more than 100 sports articles. Blog posts were analyzed and compared with issues of the newspapers Asahi and Yomiuri. The analysis showed that most blog posts referenced information from the newspapers as primary sources. The bloggers added very few of their own opinions and were rarely offensive or critical. Most comments to replies were agreeable in nature. These findings indicate that bloggers for Japanese sports do not feel free to post their own opinions and might limit opinions to individual messages. Although other research shows that some bloggers insert their own opinions in the blogosphere, the results of this study indicate that bloggers may not post their own opinions or critiques for fear of alienating readers. Previous studies have shown a strong influence of blogs in a political context, but the results of this study suggest that sports blogs have little effect on public opinion. The analysis suggests that bloggers can find more valuable content to post at sports fields and stadiums, therefore future research should focus on the “authentic voice” for sports websites.
“We Made You Pay Attention”: Media Representations of Sex Segregation and Male Practice Players in Women’s College Basketball
- Laura UPENIEKS, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Canada
- Ioana SENDROIU, University of Toronto, Canada
To take a step forward and move beyond the bounds of sex segregation and its stringent grip on sport, we need to both imagine and implement spaces for competition between women and men. This paper gives close consideration to the interaction between male practice players and elite NCAA Division 1 female basketball players in the United States, through a content analysis of media articles on the subject. We analyze 122 news articles using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a software program comprised of a set of database dictionaries that reflect psychologically meaningful linguistic categories. Our findings suggest that in contrast to NCAA committees that have raised concerns that this practice subordinates female athletes, the media has portrayed the practice in a largely positive light. We find that the media largely ignore the ways in which the use of male practice players reinforces gender essentialism, instead highlighting the friendships that develop as part of these cross-gender interactions. Moreover, the use of male practice players is advocated in terms of its diffuse rewards or benefits rather than success or failure. While the use of male practice players may be a way to challenge sex segregation in sport, much more work is needed to understand the “promises and pitfalls” of gender integration in sport.
Session: Media and Sport. Part II
Friday, 20 July 2018: 17:30-19:20
Session Organizer: Brent MCDONALD, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
The PRE-Coverage of the Folha De São Paulo Newspaper of the Olympic Games Rio/2016
- Gustavo SANFELICE, University Feevale, Brazil
- Janaina Andretta DIEDER, Feevale University, Brazil
- Francieli MACHADO DE SOUZA, Feevale UNIVERSITY, Brazil
- Norberto KUHN JUNIOR, Feevale University, Brazil
Sporting events in Brazil made possible the “so-called” decade of the sport. From 2007, starting with the Pan American Games in Rio, then the Soccer World Cup in Brazil/2014, until the Olympic Games (OG) in Rio de Janeiro/2016. Brazil was on the international media agenda due to the coverage of the events mentioned above. Millions and sometimes billions of people around the world were following the Olympic Games via the press. The Olympic Games in Rio 2016 alone had a 3.5 billion of viewers (half of the global population) who watched at least a minute of the Olympic events (Source: COI, 2016). This research aimed to analyze the coverage of covers of the Folha de São Paulo/Brazil newspaper about the pre-Olympic Games Rio/2016 period. This is a qualitative and descriptive study, having as corpus the covers of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper from July 1st to August 4th, 2016 (representing the pre-event period until its opening date). The analysis was performed using the Content Analysis of Bardin (2011). The qualitatively analyzed data formed five categories: “Cultural Aspects”; “Event Costs”; “Organization of the Event”; “Athletes training/sports performance” and “ Political and Social Issues.” We concluded that during the pre-event the Folha de São Paulo newspaper emphasized aspects related to public money and organization and preparation for the event, for instance, security plan, financing of the games and problems with the Olympic Village.
The Data Analyst: Elite Sport Performance and Precarious Work
- Brad MILLINGTON, University of Bath, United Kingdom
- Andrew MANLEY, University of Bath, United Kingdom
- Shaun WILLIAMS, University of Bath, United Kingdom
In January 2017, the online publication Paste Magazine, in its regular ‘Secret Soccer Analyst’ column, featured a frank and forewarning confessional on the work and life of a sports data analyst. Writing under the clever heading, ‘Mo Moneyball Mo Problems’, the anonymous author lamented everything from the isolating nature of the data analyst role, to the immense time commitment data analytics require, to the low standards of pay that characterize the industry – the last of these deemed a function of the large pool of labourers from which employers can draw. “I’ve been depressed for a few years now and I’ve just started to get professional help,” the secret author revealed. “Every day I wonder if my job is a glimmer of hope in my life, or my worst enemy” (https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/01/the-secret-soccer-analyst-mo-moneyball-mo-problems.html). As knowledge labourers situated in an economy increasingly characterized by precarious (i.e., flexible, insecure, low pay) work, and, more specifically, as skilled but increasingly abundant workers in an elite sporting context dependent on time-sensitive insights into ever larger pools of performance data, the sports data analyst role indeed seems ripe for the types of problems outlined in the secret analyst’s confessional. This presentation seeks to interrogate the twin premises that, in an age of Big Data, data analysts are growing more important to elite sport performance while at the same time experiencing work and life conditions that are marked by precarity. The presentation contextualizes the role of the data analyst in relation to the wider Big Data moment before discussing the presenters’ empirical work on Big Data in sport, which includes preliminary insight into the challenging and in some ways precarious nature of data analysis work.
Blood Boundaries? Contesting the Racial and National Identities of the Mixed-Race Philippine Men’s National Soccer Team Players within Media and Public Debates
- Satwinder REHAL, The University of the Philippines Open University, Paranaque City, Metro Manila NCR, Philippines, The Philippine Women’s University Manila, Philippines
The increasingly global dispersion of elite athletes pursuing sporting careers is an important aspect of the global flow of sport-capital. International sport has enhanced this dispersion characterized by a growing tendency for sportspeople to represent a country other than the one in which they were born. Within this social sphere, questions abound about an athlete’s attachment to place, particularly in relation to citizenship, identity and nationalism. This has been made manifest in the Philippine context where questions have been raised, mostly through media and resultant public debates debates, on the identities of mixed race members of the Philippine men’s national soccer team, the Azkals. This paper is grounded on the case of the ‘mixed-race’ Azkals in the discourse on sports, media and globalization, in highlighting a theoretical discussion on the concept of transnationalism vis-à-vis the use of ‘blood’ and ‘color’ as figurative metaphors in imagining the ‘nation’ and ‘citizenship’. In conclusion, the paper calls for a shift from employing color and blood as metaphors of race, nation, citizenship and culture and argues for instead for a massive remetaphorization of constructed ideologies which in effect challenges the idea that a national community and its identity are necessarily bounded by geographic border and its ‘indigenousness’. Doing this would lend itself to sociologically relevant theorizing that consciously questions attachment to place, particularly in relation of sports to citizenship, identity and nationalism within a Global South context.
From Conflict to Convergence: Olympic Nationalism Discourse in China
- Ai SONG, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
This paper aimed to challenge China’s internet analysis’s that focus on empowerment or took the perspective of technology determinism. I take discourse conflict between online criticism and state-oriented mainstream media as example, to indicate that online discourse’s nationalistic characteristics made it easy to be converged to mainstream media discourse.
As internet supplied a platform for alternative voices in China, and first years of 2010 witnessed many cases of online public opinion’s surveillance towards China’s political power, many scholar tend to expect on the empowerment for grassroots. However, by analyzing the nationalistic online and media discourse during Olympics of London games and Rio games, I argue that even in climax of optimism in 2012, nationalism made online discourse easily convergent to mainstream media discourse.
Olympics are “ regularly recurred celebration of a coherent set of values, beliefs and symbols”. Also for both KMT regime and CCP regime, nationalism is used for legitimate China’s regime. Thus, regularly recurring nationalism discourse during Olympics, is a good example for chronological analysis to explore the changing of media environment in China.
By analyzing most commented and retweeted SNS post and mainstream state-oriented media discourse during 2012 London games period and 2016 Rio games, and also series policy of “media convergence” and “internet+” during 2014 to 2015, I argue besides the policy intervention for China’s media, nationalistic characteristic of online discourse is also a reason made it easy to converged to mainstream media discourse.
From News Delivery to Social Interaction: New Form of Sports Programs Live Broadcast Via Internet and Its New Effect
- Jing LI, Wuhan Sports University, China
Internet Live Broadcast is a new form of media communication, which transcends conventional media platforms due to its larger and more extensive coverage. Sports matches and programs with its competitiveness, fierceness and entertaining elements, can be delivered quicker, opener and more freely through new media platforms. Internet live broadcast featuring pictures, videos, scripts, 3D, VR interprets sports matches in a panoramic and multidimensional ways by maintaining visibility of conventional media and varying the original ways of staging programs. In a platform combing virtual and real worlds, it also change what once to be mere link between anchors and audiences into host and users, and it creates a social interactive environment where host and users, users and users interact with each other via comments, dialogues and giving awards. Live broadcast becomes a whole new social platform on internet and it strengthens initiative of users and expands social communication.
Session: Sport, Politics and Policy
Saturday, 21 July 2018: 08:30-10:20
Session Organizer: Michael SAM, University of Otago, New Zealand
Sport is integrated across all sectors of society (public, private and voluntary) and it is often characterised by a messy co-mingling of the three. Changes in policy (or the introduction of new policies) invariably entail an attempt to change the structure or balance of real power within/between organisations. Analysing the politics around these processes is worthy of attention because they not only reflect citizen demands – they shape expectations as well, giving issues like ‘obesity’, or ‘medal counts’ legitimacy in the public domain. This session welcomes papers having a focus on politics and policy as they relate to matters of the state (both local and federal), supra-national institutions and sport governing bodies.
Olympic Ambivalence – the Oslo Process for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games
- Jon Helge LESJO, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
The City of Oslo together with the Norwegian NOC (NIF) organized from 2012 a campaign towards bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. In July 2014 the IOC accepted Oslo as a candidate city. Yet in October, the Conservative party’s members of parliament rejected support for any state guarantee, a decision that the Conservative-led national government immediately supported. The City of Oslo and its partner NIF were then obliged to follow suit and to end the campaign. This decision was first followed by some aggrieved responses from the IOC, which had lost their last European candidate. At first Oslo’s withdrawal contributed to a new Olympic crisis, but it has probably lead to a softening of the regulations and the demands placed upon the future host cities.
Oddly enough, conservative politicians, traditionally strong supporters of Norway’s Olympic ambitions, brought this process to an end. The result was the outcome of a political process which included the participation of local governments, citizens in a local referendum (where a majority approved), local and national sport organizations, national politicians and important media players. Memories of earlier national competitions between potential applicant cities and residues of the negative impressions in public opinion of the 2014 Sochi Games were also important.
This paper highlights the ambiguity of multi-actor politics and public sport policy, activating distinct institutional logics among players from different fields. Ambiguity is obvious in Norwegian popular opinion as well, which pays homage to the Winter Games for producing national heroes and gold-medal winners, but is currently hostile to the Games’ owner, the IOC, because of its elitist image and lack of democratic accountability.
The methodology of the paper is based on the study of public documents, evaluation reports and an analysis of the media coverage.
The Team with No Left Wingers. on the Roots of Right Wing Political Orientation Among Polish Fandom
- Wojciech WOZNIAK, University of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology, Poland
- Radoslaw KOSSAKOWSKI, University of Gdansk, Poland
- Przemyslaw NOSAL, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
The data collected by Kossakowski (2016) in the largest survey of Polish football fans confirms that their political attitudes are skewed towards the far right. One quarter of 888 respondents declared no political preferences while more than half supports three radical anti-establishment parties. Law and Justice, ruling right-wing party is supported by 5,56 percent while four left-wing parties gained three percent. Anti-establishment attitudes are accompanied with the growth of nationalist ideology at the terraces, what is very much in line with memory politics as developed by current right-wing government of Poland.
The paper is an attempt to discuss several non mutually-exclusive explanations of the phenomenon:
- Contrary to the resurgence of right-wing attitudes at the football stands in other European countries, situation in Poland remains stable as the right-wing orientation of the fandom lasts for a long time.
- It is a good predictor predictor of tendencies in the national politics: demise of left-wing parties and conservative turn among young generation confirmed by voting behaviours.
- Aforementioned single-mindedness stems from the shape of political scene and the discourse prevalent throughout transition period. The long shadow of communism over the public discourse impacted political debate and other social fields (e.g. economic/academic ones).
- The radicalization of right-wing parties, particularly anti-migrant rhetoric gave a new momentum to chauvinism and xenophobia refuelling nationalism and right-wing extremism in Poland. This can be partially explained by the ethnic/religious composition of the most homogenous society in Europe. Nevertheless, relatively well organized Polish fandom remains independent from the interferences of institutionalized politics. To the contrary, they sometimes form surprising political alliances to get influence on local decision-making processes.
The empirical basis of the paper is quantitative and qualitative data on football fandom in Poland gathered within several ongoing research projects which are conducted by the authors.
Sport Policy, Athletes’ Rights and Citizenship
- Margaret MACNEILL, University of Toronto, Canada
- Bruce KIDD, University of Toronto, Canada
- Rosie MACLENNAN, University of Toronto, Canada
In a policy conversation with Olympian-advocate-scholars — Dr. Bruce Kidd and Rosie Maclennan — we explore the changing inter/national landscape of sport policy and the implications it holds for athletes’ rights from a social justice perspective and for the multiple notions of citizenry held by athletes. Policy engagement and social initiatives by present and former athletes are observed in order to scrutinize: (1) athletes’ rights and relationships with sports organizations, transnational media, and sponsors; (2) the meanings and forms of citizenship fostered in different kinds of political activity; and (3) how different approaches to policymaking help or hinder social justice. While competing internationally and serving as an athlete representative for the International Federation of Gymnastics and the Canadian Olympic Committee, Maclennan discusses how she investigates the roles and identities of high performance athletes, the complex regulations and contractual agreements imposed by governing bodies, and the myriad of pressures acting on athletes as they pursue ‘social responsibility’ initiatives in and around the realm of sport. For Kidd, “‘critical support’ or ‘critical partisanship’ is the commitment to the rigorous scrutiny of and intervention into the ideas, institutions and practices to which one is committed, advocates and carries out” (2013, p.341). His wide range of emancipatory projects have contributed to policy changes, ranging from including athlete representation on sport governing bodies, the right to due process and arbitration as a basic human right and the dismantling of gender verification policies of international sport federations, to deploying sport as a vehicle to help end apartheid in South Africa. A critical appraisal of policy making models, assumptions of citizenry and ethical foundations of ‘best practices’ in sport policy and governance will be synthesized to advocate a number of ways forward to an intersectional and intersectoral approach to social justice in sport.
The Geopolitical Role of Non-Recognized and Partially Recognized Polities in Sport
- Rolando DROMUNDO, ISSA, Mexico
Since its origins, the Olympic Games and several World Championships have been a significant showcase for participant countries. For a sovereign state, these events represent an opportunity to display itself in the international arena, while the results obtained could symbolize, among other issues, the success or failure of a regime. Instead, for several non-recognized or partially recognized polities, it is a chance to portray their struggle for a full recognized statehood, for autonomy or simply for recognition of a local identity.
To that extent, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since its origins has argued that Sport geography may differ from political geography. Currently, the United Nations counts with 193 members and two observers, while the IOC includes 206 National Olympic Committees (NOC) plus 8 NOC’s recognized continentally.
Different approaches can be found by the IOC and the International Sport Federations to accept or tolerate the participation of non-fully recognized polities generating also several controversies. Meanwhile, these polities, have been either able to compete as a recognized national representation or have been forced to participate under a different flag denying their chance to promote their own local struggles.
In that sense, without clearly defined criterion among International Sport Federations and the IOC, the whole ordeal is not exempt of the global geopolitical tendencies, where geopolitics impacts the position taken by sports authorities in favour or against different local struggles for recognition.
European Nations and the Olympic Games: Solidarity or Antagonism? from Athens 1896 to Barcelona 1992
- Matteo ANASTASI, LUMSA University (Rome), Italy
- Roberto LUPPI, LUMSA University (Rome), Italy
“The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play”
The fourth principle of the Olympic Charter summarizes the widespread belief that the values of friendship, solidarity and fair play should characterize the practice of sport and, especially, the modern sporting event par excellence, the Olympic Games. These Games combine these values with an additional aspect: that of universality. Internationalism was, in fact, one of the beliefs of Baron de Coubertin, the creator of modern Olympics, and found its graphic representation in the symbol of the Games: five intersecting circles signifying the creation of bridges between cultures and peoples.
Unquestionably, the Olympic Games have increased contacts among nations. It is more difficult to say whether these exchanges have contributed to the cause of internationalism, understood as the increase of solidarity relationships among countries. The paper aims to analyse precisely this question, in particular: is it possible to claim that the modern Olympics fostered the development of international solidarity among nations? And if so, did they contribute only to the reinforcement of pre-existing dynamics or have they served as a catalyst for developing new relations, perhaps opposing previous trends?
In this regard, the article examines five Olympic Games, which can be considered a microcosms of the international relations of their period: Athens 1896, Berlin 1936, Rome 1960, Moscow 1980 and Barcelona 1992.
The paper circumscribes its analysis to only the relations among European countries, since, in the 20th century, these nations were involved in major upheavals (World Wars, Cold War, the process of European integration), which make it a fruitful starting point for examining the influence of the Olympics in international relations
The Political Economy of Football: A Cross-National Data Analysis of FIFA Men’s Scores, 1999–2014
- Ka U NG, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- Kin Man WAN, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Thung-Hong LIN, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
From the perspective of political–economic synergies, we argue that the interaction of economic development and democracy, the essential factor sustaining a strong professional football industry, improves the performance of men’s national football teams. A professional football industry is a typical ‘club good’, a type of semipublic good that attracts people to take collective action in watching the game and investing their talent and capital. Moreover, economic development increases the private sport consumption of fans whether their countries are democratic or not. In contrast to wealthy autocracies, wealthy democracies effectively shape the transparent and competitive institutional incentives of leagues and contribute to their prosperity, which benefits the national football teams’ talent pools. We used panel data from 131 countries between 1999 and 2014 and fixed-effect regression models controlling the climatic conditions and population to show the effect of synergy between development and democracy on the performance of men’s national football teams, measured using the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) score. We found that democratically developed synergy, intermediated by a robust professional football industry, improved the performance of men’s national football teams.
Session: Sport, Justice and Development
Saturday, 21 July 2018: 10:30-12:20
Session Organizer: Cora BURNETT-LOUW, Department of Sport and Movement Studies, University of Johannesburg,, South Africa
The role of sport for delivering in the field of international mainstream development, or as part of the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) movement is a contentious issue. Since the UN declaration in 2003 about using sport as a vehicle for delivering on Sustainable Development Goals, main stakeholders developed policies, structures and partnerships to become part of this social movement. Major tensions emerged between Global North and Global South partnerships linked to unequal power relations and the domination of neo-Colonial ideology. Delivering sport (for) development programmes with the focus on individual agency is mostly underpinned by a liberalist framework and fails to address discriminatory systems and structural constraints. Most practices adhere to a human justice framework, but the interrogation of policies and strategies from sport powerhouses such as the IOC and FIFA reveals a top-down, pre-determined development agenda with relatively little room for indigenous participation and practice. This session invites papers that address the complexity of stakeholder agency in this crowded policy space, and asks for reflection on unequal power relations and multiple practices that explore discriminatory practices and contextual inequalities. Papers on theoretical underpinnings and theories of change, policy frameworks and practices that could advance the body of knowledge are also welcome.
Critical Insights into the Political Economy of Sport for Development and Peace
- Simon DARNELL, University of Toronto, Canada
In this presentation, I draw on the findings of a recently completed major research study into the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Over a period of more than two years, our team conducted research in Jamaica, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Zambia; further research was carried out at SDP events and conferences in Europe and North America and through interviews with major international SDP stakeholders. These diverse locations were selected to ensure the capture of current SDP activity, and to maximize the diversity of geographies and cultures included within the fieldwork. Most data were collected through qualitative research involving mixtures of participant observation, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews. From this research, I advance three main arguments. First, despite rhetorical and political commitment to the use of sport to pursue grassroots, participatory and ‘bottom up’ development, I suggest that the SDP sector as currently organized still proceeds in a heavily top-down fashion, with corporations, international non-governmental organizations, funders, and inter-governmental bodies holding significant influence on the sector. Second, the marrying of sport to international development has resulted in a range of political tensions within the SDP sector, such as whether sport organizations should be focused on sport first and development second, and whether the commercialization and professionalization of SDP practices has yielded positive results. Third, while SDP programs have demonstrated important benefits, the top-down structure of the global SDP sector clearly has effects on local initiatives, some unexpected, and not always positive. The implications of these arguments are discussed.
The Globalization of ‘Bicycles for Development’: Examining a Sport for Development ‘Movement’
- Mitchell MCSWEENEY, York University, Canada
- Madison ARDIZZI, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Lyndsay HAYHURST, York University, Canada
- Brian WILSON, University of British Columbia, Canada
Sport for development (SFD), which refers to the use of sport and physical activity to improve livelihoods and respond to broader social development issues (Kidd, 2008), has rapidly proliferated in recent years in research and practice (Schulenkorf, Sherry, & Rowe, 2016). Despite this increase in attention to the challenges and opportunities related to SFD, limited consideration has been paid to the globalization of the ‘bicycles for development’ (BFD) ‘movement’, which features a variety of corporations, non-governmental organizations, international institutions, and local communities. Although there is research that has explored the intended and unintended consequences of the globalization of sport (Giulianotti, 2004; Thibault, 2009), there remains a gap of in-depth research on BFD – and how it relates to SFD – as a form of globalization. Specifically, there is a notable lacuna in the research that explores the impact and role of bicycles and how they move from the Global North to – and within – the Global South. Therefore, in this paper, we outline the contemporary globalization of the BFD ‘movement’ based on an analysis of a global ‘BFD’ map, encompassing over 60 BFD organizations operating in more than 40 countries. We discuss and reflect on: 1) the work of BFD organizations and their associated ‘development’ goals; 2) the locations and areas of the world that the BFD movement operates across and within; and 3) the social issues identified by each organization, attending to how these issues may or may not vary by region. In doing so, we attend to how this BFD ‘movement’ occurs within complex sets of socio-cultural-political relations infused with power dynamics, and offer preliminary insights into how the BFD ‘movement’ has been influenced by, and influences, globalization. Finally, we address the potential of the BFD ‘movement’ and what is needed for future research and understanding.
Critically Examining the Norwegian Sport for Development and Peace Context: Partnerships and Policies
- Kelvin LEUNG, York University, Canada
The Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) movement has gained international recognition from governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), sport federations and corporate sponsors. Participation in sport has been promoted as a medium to attain development goals (Kidd, 2008), and a plethora of entities have emerged since the United Nations adopted SDP as a part of its development agenda. Norway has been a leading donor country in the SDP movement (Right to Play, 2008), and has funded Norwegian actors including the national Olympic Committee, various sport federations and NGOs.
The participation of a diverse range of actors in SDP has exhibited a vast assortment of organizational values and approaches to foreign aid. The current body of SDP scholarship has highlighted the tension between elite-performance athletics (i.e., sport development) and mass participation sport (i.e., sport for development), as well as among top-down and bottom-up approaches to development (e.g., Black, 2010; Houlihan & White, 2002). Partnerships have often been formed between actors that have possessed ideological differences in values, which has routinely led to the submission of ‘weaker’ partners to the realization of priorities set by more well-established actors (cf. Black, 2017; Hayhurst & Frisby, 2010). In so doing, the unbalanced set of power relations between partners has frequently upheld the hegemonic practices of neoliberal and neocolonial agendas in SDP (cf. Guest, 2009; Kidd 2008).
While there has been growing scholarship that has critically examined partnerships in SDP (e.g., Black, 2017; Hayhurst & Frisby, 2010), few studies have investigated partnerships in the Norwegian context, despite Norway’s position as a vital actor in the international SDP movement. This study will therefore examine the nature of the relationships among the variety of Norwegian SDP actors in addition to the ways in which Norwegian SDP policies have been influenced by partnerships among these actors.
Analysing the Process of Social Transformation for Social Inclusion through Sport: A Japanese Case
- Naofumi SUZUKI, Hitotsubashi University, Japan
This paper examines how sport can contribute to transforming social structure so as to promote social inclusion. Drawing on the case study of a football-based homeless assistance programme in Japan, it attempts to theorise the process in which a sport-based programme enlarge not only the life chances of those who are severely excluded, but also its own organisational capacity to achieve that goal through interacting and networking with general public as well as similar organisations. This process is explained by referring to social theories such as Amartya Sen’s capability approach, Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, and institutional as well as ecological approaches to organisational studies. The focal point of analysis is the organisational trajectory of Nobushi Japan, a football programme provided primarily for the vendors of the Big Issue Japan. While the programme was launched a decade ago so as to enter a team to the Homeless World Cup, it now domestically organises its own football tournament called the Diversity Cup, which connects a range of organisations trying to promote social inclusion for a variety of vulnerable people. Through this tournament, the model of social inclusion programme using football and other sporting activities has started to spread across the participating organisations. The paper is based on three years of consultancy and participant observation with Nobushi Japan, as well as semi-structured interviews with ten other organisations using sport to promote social inclusion, of which majority participate in the Diversity Cup. The paper concludes with some implications as to how a certain approach to social innovation gain legitimacy, and thus an organisational field is formed, resulting in gradual transformation of social structure.
In Quest of Safeguarding Children’s Welfare in and through Sport
- Pinar YAPRAK KEMALOGLU, Gazi University Faculty of Sport Sciences, Turkey
Nationwide or global sporting developments can be multifaceted and relatively hyperrealistic/simulative with regard to remaining controversies or inequalities such as changing ways or levels of access to or kaleidoscopic backstories in relation to the well-arranged sporting practices. Accordingly, the value of sporting configurations to contribute to the overall wellbeing or development of a person and society have been questioned by critical researchers exploring the (levels/ways of) unconformities between the developmental promises/missions of sports (configurations) and how they have been performed. This paper, derived from my ethnographic study of “safeguarding children’s welfare in sport in Turkey”, focuses on the critical results that reflect on such as the meanings of the current achievements, ongoing practices and challenges in and beyond sport fields. Moreover, the complexity of the individual and collective agency and maintaining the developmental processes regarding children’s welfare in sport were addressed in the context of dynamic social structures such as transnational socio-cultural-political constraints (e.g. ableism, hegemonic masculinity, imbalances of power or development) and opportunities (e.g. geographical collaborations, inclusive traditions) which have been historically present in related interactions or institutions. In quest of safeguarding children’s welfare in and through sport, this paper offers critical account and specific recommendations for Turkish context (with the acknowledgement of the importance of diverse stakeholders’ role) to enhance the related body of knowledge and to further stimulate the sound research, policy and practice.
Session: Sport in the Global South: BRICS
Saturday, 21 July 2018: 12:30-14:20
Session Organizer: Michael SAM, University of Otago, New Zealand
Modern sport is intricately linked to globalization. While globalization has enabled sport’s transformation into a transnational phenomenon, such changes have been founded on variable regional/local responses: passive, purposeful and resistant. This session has a broad thematic focus on social issues relating to sport and globalization, including aspects of power, violence and justice. It also welcomes papers from diverse theoretical backgrounds addressing transformations in the technologies, politics, cultures and social networks surrounding sport.
Russian World Cup-2018 and Corporate Power.
- Mikhail SINYUTIN, Saint-Petersburg State University, Russian Federation
The paper investigates the corporate interests and strategies in promoting and organizing FIFA World Cup-2018 in Russia. Sport is viewed from the perspective of business that is, built on the logic of capitalism, and its impact on everyday social life and including sport and leisure consumption. The paper focuses on corporate sponsorship, advertizing campaigns and political lobbying, to highlight the logic of capitalist monopolies within the global sport industry, specifically sport mega-events. Increasingly leisure time, both globally and in Russia, influenced by the media, corporations and the governments who seek revenues from the consumption of sport both in terms of participation and spectatotorship. The main corporate sponsors of Russian sport are oil and gas companies (Gasprom, Lukoil, etc), metal companies (Severstal, Norilsky Nikel, etc), and financial and banking structures (Sberbank, VTB24, etc). Many of these corporations are deeply embedded in Russian political power, lobbying their business interests resulting in a tendency to merge state and corporate business interests. The sport industry, including football, is a rapidly growing sector of Russian business especially as sport becomes more global. This paper concerns the global developments and changes in geopolitics, focusing on the rising confrontation of the West with Russia. Following the recent global financial crisis there has been a tendency to locate international sport mega-events, particularly football tournaments, in countries with developing economies that often lack the power of financial capital, like BRICS states (China 2008 Olympics, Brazil 2016 Olympics, Russian 2014 Winter Olympics, South African 2010 FIFA World Cup, Brazil 2014 FIFA World Cup, India 2017 U-17 FIFA World Cup, Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup, etc). Despite the social inequalities within hosting states and even admitting the social value of developing sport facilities for mega-events, corporations use their power to subjugate sport to business interests.
Brazilian State and the Symbolic Economy of Sport Mega-Events
- Michel NICOLAU NETTO, State University of Campinas – UNICAMP, Brazil
Sport Mega-events (SMEs) have become a platform to enhance the status of emergent countries in the global stage. So it was in Brazil as the country hosted the two most recent SMEs: FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games. Both were understood by the State as part of a strategy to promote a modern image of the country globally.
However, the MediaSpace of a SME is of a special sort. Most of FIFA, IOC and their partners’ profits come from two sources: broadcasting and marketing rights. It means that they base their profits on a symbolic economy, producing symbolic forms with economic value. This is a consequence of the process of globalization that may be seen in the history of SMEs, since the end of the 1970s, in two senses. First of all, this economy has been globalized as the capital involved in it started coming from multinational companies, with global market interests. Secondly, the multinational sport institutions have gathered more control over marketing and broadcasting rights strategies and negotiations, retrieving them from national agencies.
In order to make this economy work, the sport institutions must guarantee that the landscape of the SME will be suitable for the economic valuation of the symbolic forms. Therefore, they demand from the State to produce the landscape of the SMEs as one in which they have the authority over the symbolic forms.
It means that, if the State produces the country image to be promoted globally, it also needs to produce a landscape in which the authority over the symbolic forms has been denationalized.
In this paper I want to analyze both roles of the State and the conflicts that were related to them. In order to do so, I will present results of a research carried out in Brazil since 2013.
The Hospitality of the Brazilian Population in the Host City of Manaus in the Context of the 2014 Football WORLD CUP
- Cesar CASTILHO, Universidade Federal de São João Del Rei, Brazil, Physical Education, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Christianne GOMES, Physical Education, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / CNPQ / FAPEMIG, Brazil, Belo Horizonte – MG, Brazil
The aim of this research is to analyze the question of the hospitality of the Brazilian population in the host city of Manaus through the “gift” theory, built by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in direct association with the theory of contemporary hospitality. It is claimed to discuss the hospitality of the local population under the aegis of the Brazilian cultural formation and the use of this characteristic – real or invented – of the population by the organizers and politicians involved in the 2014 World Cup (2014 WC). By means of qualitative research – interviews, observations, documentary analysis, photography – carried out in three different moments, this theme was discussed so that the two main research questions could be explored: Taking into account the theoreticians of the cultural formation of the country, is it possible to discuss the construction of a national hospitality, especially with regard to the foreign visitor? How has this characteristic been manipulated by organizers / politicians? When analyzing the hegemonic discourse of the actors, we perceive the use of local hospitality as a prerequisite for the success of the sporting event. Although the tangible and intangible legacies of the 2014 WC are in constant debate, the Brazilian population has been “escalated” to receive and entertain foreign visitors. Shortly after the event, the former FIFA president said the 2014 WC had been a success, notably the warmth of the local people. In Manaus, it was possible to analyze the participation and hospitality of the population with foreigners and the manipulation and use of this feature by the organizers. In addition, one can also see the direct consequences of local festivities and hospitality in the development of tourism in the following years in Manaus.
FIFA U-17 India: The Future of Football – Expansions Endorsed
- Sanjay TEWARI, Uttar Pradesh Athletics Association, India
The FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 may see some of the most excellent and gifted juvenile players from around the globe collectively in a preview of the potential and future of the men’s sport, but the organizers in India want to ensure that girls and women too take a part both mentally and physically in the tournament’s legacy. The name given to this dream project is “Mission XI Million”, which envisages making sure that all youngsters, both girls and boys, invariably play a role in developing the future of football in India, a nation which has been obsessed with the fever of cricket for decades. The FIFA U-17 in India happens to be an endorsement and approval for football, which till now has found itself limited to small playgrounds, lacking for apt facilities and amenities, and with almost no commercial support. The Government of India is firm in its resolve, to support the cause of football, and garner our youth to grow themselves into proper players, and individuals, and in this process, decent citizens. This project revolves around the noble idea of contacting Schools aiming to get 11 million children enjoy the game of football, with the sole intention and revelation of making football an alternating sport preference in India.
In my role as a State Coordinator of the IAAF Kid’s Athletics Program, which too draws children from Schools, I envision this Mission as one analogous initiative to make sport practices in India more vibrant. Having studied and practiced the Kid’s Athletics, I draw a report on the positives of the Mission XI Million, and in my role as a Sociologist, to outline the primary obstructions for sociological growth through the sport of football in particular, as a movement, to achieve further recognition as a valuable instrument for development.
South African Sport: The Rugby Franchise System, and Emerging Soccer Unionism
- Kiran ODHAV, North West University, Mafikeng, North West Province, South Africa
- Gerald MONYATSI, North West University, South Africa
The paper examines two most popular sports in South Africa, that is, rugby and soccer, by providing a background on the history sports in South Africa.
The first part describes and analyzes its rugby, a recently corporatized finance system emerging almost overnight out of a 100-year old amateur and voluntary system. In this changeover, problems arise, of contradictions and fissures, alongside the development of rugby as a highly specialized field but with franchise power, particularly in the top rugby clubs. Thus one top club, monopolistic as it is, recently faced bankruptcy, even as an iconic club. The drive to gain black fans may be due to such bankruptcy. In sum, the role of rugby franchises in this scenario is analyzed, and what are the possibilities and problems of professional rugby in the new political dispensation.
The second part focuses on South African soccer, to outline an emerging unionism in professional football. Player unionization has been relatively neglected by industrial sociologists. Professional player unionization in South Africa began in 1997, with the formation of the South African Football Players Union (SAFPU). Prior to this, professional football players have always been at the mercy of their employers, that is, club owners who would take unilateral decisions on matters pertaining to players’ contracts and the like. This section seeks to focus on particular issues that relate to players’ rights and their playing conditions, of aspects relating to contracts and development, and to the kinds of avenues that are open (or are being opened up) and if these are being fully exploited by some players in the Professional Soccer League (PSL).
Capacity of Program Second Half (Programa Segundo Tempo – PST): Cultural Matrix of Educational Sport
- Sheylazarth RIBEIRO, Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Karine OLIVEIRA, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
In Brazil sports intercalate with society through the different sectors, however in the last 14 years the development of the Ministry of Sports influenced the country with actions of decentralized sports. These actions, shared among educational sport, leisure and performance, are policies meant to help the population from three different sports. The educational sport has a program named Program Second Half (PST) that discloses and produces a collection of information to organize the types of use of sport for the involved professionals. This information is named the cultural matrix of educational sport, because it systematizes a professional formation so the Nucleus Coordinators who perform with the population can be capable of applying this sport format. The objective of the research is understanding how the educational sport matrix produces information about leisure and how the Nucleus Coordinators apply leisure with the participants. As methodology we performed a documented research about PST and analyzed the data. We noticed that PST is formed by a very distinct group of people and that is not convinced of the inclusion of leisure in its principles and guidelines. Even without this clarification the PST uses a strategy to act through leisure which is the special program Recess of Vacation. The form that leisure affects the Nucleus Coordinators in the capacity of PST is in the contents transmitted via the EaD Capacity and on the books and Recess on Vacation. The leisure theme is discussed in the EaD Capacity and in the book in a specific chapter which discusses the theme proposing ways of implementing it on the groups. This abstract reports on research funded by FAPEMIG (Fundação de apoio a pesquisa em Minas Gerais – Research Support Foundation of MG, Brasil).
