Tag: rightwing populism

This special issue is part of a larger and ambitious interdisciplinary project that aims to bring together leisure scholars with researchers from other disciplines (e.g., sport studies, political science, internet and media studies, anthropology, sociology, and others) exploring the far right. Writing in dyads or teams working across disciplines, manuscripts will build on the small body of existing leisure research on the topic to take on different elements of how leisure is used in the making, maintaining, exposing, and combating the far right.

This workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to debate the histories, meanings, significance, and contexts of sport-articulated populism. In addressing an understudied but relevant topic within sport history, the aim is to bridge the fields of sport history, cultural studies, sociology, and political science, and, in doing so, provide a forum to further collaborative understanding, knowledge advancement, and research dissemination.

This book project began as a cross-disciplinary conversation – theatre, performance studies, anthropology – presented first in a panel at a 2017 conference. The editors wish now to expand the field to allow a wider range of perspectives and voices to weigh in on the question of how professional wrestling might be implicated in the current resurgence of populist politics.

At a time when key global actors institute “alternative facts” as a way to further institute racism, classism, homophobia, patriarchy and sexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression, this special issue aims to highlight what critical understandings of leisure can do to challenge anti-intellectual, imperial pursuits.