Tag: geography of sports

Sport is everywhere in social life, yet for decades it remained marginal in Geography. Early works were mostly descriptive, while only from the 1990s onward did scholars such as John Bale and Gilmar Mascarenhas begin to treat sport as an analytical object. Even today, its full recognition as a legitimate field of geographic inquiry is still emerging. These seminars seek to advance a critical geography of sport. We present contributions that use geographic categories rigorously to analyze sport as a spatial, territorial, scalar, and identity-based phenomenon.

Sport is everywhere in social life, yet for decades it remained marginal in Geography. Early works were mostly descriptive, while only from the 1990s onward did scholars such as John Bale and Gilmar Mascarenhas begin to treat sport as an analytical object. Even today, its full recognition as a legitimate field of geographic inquiry is still emerging. This call seeks to advance a critical geography of sport. We invite contributions that use geographic categories rigorously to analyze sport as a spatial, territorial, scalar, and identity-based phenomenon.

Building on the “spatial turn” in social sciences, this issue positions Olympic-related infrastructure as socio-technical systems that structure social relations, redistribute opportunities, and mediate power between stakeholders. The planning of the Olympic Games is increasingly shifting away from a monocentric model, resulting in networked venues, multi-city clusters, and diversified legacies.

The symposium seeks to address this lack of knowledge, exploring the design of different sport and recreational landscapes over time and how they have given expression to various understandings of nature and culture. What are the relationships between sport landscapes and their environment? What is the relationship between the site itself and the culture of sports and recreation embedded within it?

It is nearly thirty years since John Bale first published his agenda setting book ‘Sports Geography’. This session aims to bring together all those who are, in some way, teaching about geographies of sport, or are interested in doing so. We invite papers that speak to this topic to stimulate broader discussions on and beyond the themes below.

The aim of this conference is to develop an active network of academics, practitioners and campaigners with an interest in sports geographies, by which we mean the ways in which we might understand sport as something that creates spaces and places, as well as something that is shaped by spaces and places.

This session seeks to bring together a diverse array of scholars whose work deals in some way with the place of sport in people’s everyday lives — work which could be said to fit into an emerging and mutable field of “everyday sports geography”.

This session seeks to bring together a diverse array of scholars whose work deals in some way with the place of sport in people’s everyday lives — work which could be said to fit into an emerging and mutable field of “everyday sports geography”.