Tag: collective memory

A sport club is not only a sporting institution. It is a dense accumulation of founding myths, statues, museums, official histories, hall-of-fame portraits, anniversaries and commemorative rituals through which a collectivity tells itself who it is. In Pierre Nora’s terms, the club operates as a lieux de mémoire: a site where a chosen past is consecrated, made visible and put to work in the present. This special issue takes that proposition seriously and asks a single guiding question across different national settings: how does a club’s manufactured heritage actively shape its present.

This workshop aims to bring together specialists in memory studies and sports to question the assumption that attending a sporting event in common, from a soccer World Cup match to a marathon, creates memories that are themselves shared. Over the past twenty years, research on memory has focused mainly on so-called traumatic events and political violence. And they have largely left aside moments of jubilation and joy, notably sporting gatherings. Today, sport is a major collective event, but its place in the construction of collective memories has not yet given rise to numerous studies.