Call for Abstracts
BSA Sport Study Group Day Conference
Sport and Social Protest
Friday 15th May 2015
British Library Conference Centre, London
Deadline for submission of abstracts – 15 July 2014
Notification of acceptance – 15 September 2014
This day conference will explore the relationship between sport and collective mobilizations for social change. It will explore mobilizations around the staging of mega-events, the actions of athletes and spectators within sports arenas, and the role of sport in celebrated campaigns such as the global anti-apartheid and British suffragette movements. The conference will commence with a keynote speech about sport and the anti-apartheid movement from Peter Hain MP.
Sport has increasingly become a site for the construction and representation of collective identities, embodying symbolic aspirations, and drawing boundaries between those values, ideas and groups considered to be socially legitimate and illegitimate. At the same time, professional sport, through its integration into logics of industrialisation, commodification and capitalisation, has generated its own social processes of inclusion and exclusion, from the furthering of democratisation and pluralism to the generation of new social inequalities and upheavals. In these ways, sport has become both a barometer of social change, and a target for those groups wishing to bring about social change.
Discussion through the day will focus on the following issues:
- How does sport function as the theatre of particular struggles?
- How does media coverage affect sports significance for social movements?
- How does sport play a role in collective meaning contests; in battles between actors over social norms?
- How are the values that sport incarnates relevant for social movement organization?
- How do movement analyses integrate state / corporate sport within their critiques of capitalism, globalization and totalitarianism?
- How does sport work as an event, or as a series of opportunities, for movement action?
- How do the tensions between elite and mass, individual and collective, professional and public inherent in the organisation of sport manifest themselves in movement analyses and strategies?
Time and space for presentations will be limited but we welcome abstracts on these or closely related issues. Additionally it is intended that some of the presentations will form the basis for an edited collection of articles.
Please therefore send a paper title, a 300-word abstract, and your full contact details to the organizers: Dr Graeme Hayes [g.a.hayes@aston.ac.uk], Dr Chris Bolsmann [c.h.bolsmann@aston.ac.uk] and Professor John Horne [j.d.horne@uclan.ac.uk].
Additionally see information on this flyer.
