Critical Geographies of Sport

Space, Power and Sport in Global Perspective

Natalie Koch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317404293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport is a geographic phenomenon. The physical and organizational infrastructure of sport occupies a prominent place in our society. This important book takes an explicitly spatial approach to sport, bringing together research in geography, sport studies and related disciplines to articulate a critical approach to 'sports geography'. Critical Geographies of Sport illustrates this approach by engaging directly with a variety of theoretical traditions as well as the latest research methods.

Each chapter showcases the merits of a geographic approach to the study of sport – ranging from football to running, horseracing and professional wrestling. Including cases from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, the book highlights the ways that space and power are produced through sport and its concomitant infrastructures, agencies and networks. Holding these power relations at the center of its analysis, it considers sport as a unique lens onto our understanding of space.

Truly global in its perspective, it is fascinating reading for any student or scholar with an interest in sport and politics, sport and society, or human geography.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Critical geographies of sport in global perspective

Natalie Koch¹

Introduction

“The world of play,” geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1984: 3) has noted, “has an air of innocence.” But this innocence is deceptive, he argues, since power and domination are always at work in the world of play and in what he terms the “cultural-aesthetic realm.” Because of play’s unique ability to delight, power and domination are easily dissociated from it and other aesthetic activities. Writing over 30 years ago, Tuan’s work has played a key role in shaping contemporary critical geography, which foregrounds questions of power in theoretical and empirical research. Like social science more generally, geography’s recent emphasis on power has been brought to bear on a wide range of subjects. Sport, however, has not been fore among these. To be sure, geographers have been undertaking critical studies of sport in recent years, but this has been more sporadic than coherent; scholars are often more in conversation with their primary subfield than one another, or even the field of sports studies more widely.

Critical Geographies of Sport thus arises from two broad trends in contemporary geographic scholarship: the first is the institutional weakness of “sports geography” as a disciplinary subfield, and the second is an opportunity to advance existing work through directly engaging critical theoretical approaches, both within geography and beyond. United by a common research interest in sport and power, this volume brings together geographers and sports studies scholars to showcase the merits of a deeply geographic approach to the study of sport, as well as the synergies and new avenues of inquiry opened up when geographers work toward a more substantive engagement with the wider body of sports studies scholarship. By holding power relations at the center of our analyses, the aim of this volume is to take up sport as a lens for considering how scale, space, and identity come to life in a grounded fashion in diverse settings around the world. And this is a project that cannot – and should not – be confined to a disciplinary silo. Including chapters from both geography and other fields, this book aims to stimulate geographers’ interest in the wider field of sports studies and to challenge the status quo of sports geography’s institutional weakness. Critical Geographies of Sport thus provides a concrete illustration of what a reinvigorated field of sports geography might look like.

Sports geography as a subfield

John Bale’s seminal book, Sports Geography (first published in 1989, and again in 2003), initiated an ambitious agenda to define a geographic approach to studying sport. Though the author himself was nothing short of prolific in advancing this agenda, his efforts never quite coalesced into a robust subfield within geography. This notwithstanding, John Bale’s writing on sports geography has spurred many scholars to consider sport more seriously and accorded a certain name recognition to geographic research on sport outside the discipline. As with any academic leader, Bale’s contribution also consists of the way scholars work with his ideas – pushing and pulling them into new terrains – as do the contributors of this book. However, such scholarship is only sporadically articulated under the explicit rubric of “sports geography,” despite the large body of research considering the connection between sport and politics (for a recent review, see Gaffney 2014).

It is still rare to find academic geographers today who would claim the identity of “sports geographer,” despite it being commonplace to otherwise identify by subfield, such as “political geographer,” “urban geographer,” or even “Marxist geographer.” In large part responding to the stigmatization of studying sport as unprofessional or insufficiently serious (for one such critique, see Dear 1988), geographers have instead tended to frame their study of sports through their other subfield associations. Internal to geography, one effect of this dynamic is that the excellent existing work on sports geography is diffuse and lacks a clear center. Of course, such a center may not be imperative, but the lack of coherence has meant that geographers interested in sport are often not engaging in direct discussion. Externally, this lack of coherence has also meant that geography as a discipline has had a relatively small impact on the broader interdisciplinary field of sports studies. So, despite the proliferation of critical research on sport in ancillary fields, such as sociology, cultural studies, and international affairs, there is rather limited interdisciplinary learning between these disciplines and geography.

This collection revisits the question of what it means to study sport spatially, aiming to bring together some of the diffuse conversations in geography to discover our commonalities, and to make it clear to those in ancillary fields what a critical geographic approach can offer to the study of sport. Acknowledging the limitations to disciplinary Balkanization, it is nonetheless important to consider what geographers mean today when they seek to conduct research or teach on the topic of “sports geography,” and to highlight the potential for future directions and engagements with existing research in other fields. Through their diverse case studies, the contributors here collectively set the agenda for a new generation of scholars to advance a critical geography of sport. Nowhere do we seek to circumscribe the meaning of “sport,” and instead embrace its variation to promote an international perspective. Chapters therefore draw cases from a wide range of sports and sporting discourses – from football to falconry, running, horseracing, and professional wrestling – in Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Of course, in a collection such as this, it is not possible to exhaustively capture the tremendous diversity of sports and sporting practices around the world. This is not simply because of the sheer volume of pages such a task would demand, but largely because of our own limitations as scholars. For example, the larger number of case studies drawn from Europe and the Americas reflects the comparative ease with which scholars are able to conduct research at or near home, with little financial and institutional support. Due to the prevailing stigma attached to sports geography as lacking rigor and relevance, which crops up in the ranking of grant applications for competitive funding sources, geographers seldom receive research funds to develop more substantive research agendas. It may also be the case that researchers are simply not applying for funding – either discouraged by mentors or advisers or convincing themselves that reviewers will not take seriously an application with sports geography as its focus.

In any case, the result is that for many geographers, studying sport has been treated as something of a “side project,” undertaken as an addendum to larger projects positioned within their respective fields of political, urban, or cultural geography, and often shaped by their personal sporting interests or a chance encounter or discovery in their fieldwork (see for example my own work on the Astana cycling team and falconry in the Gulf states: Koch 2013, 2015). As a result, this volume includes some overlapping coverage of certain mainstream sports such as soccer/football, as well as accounts of some lesser known and studied sports such as professional wrestling or everyday urban running. It is also a struggle to find geographers working on sports-related issues in non-English speaking settings. Although aiming to achieve as much geographic diversity as possible, the chapters do not cover any case studies from Africa, for instance. While this is an admitted shortcoming, it points to the need and opportunity for geographers to expand their analyses to consider a broader range of field sites and bolster their efforts to get funding for more ambitious research projects beyond their backyard. Of course, academic disciplines can be slow to change, but overcoming the stigmatization of sports geography will require that we take our research seriously and seek the funding resources to do so.

Critical theory and the study of sport

Sports studies scholars have long approached sport as a lens through which to illuminate the political dimensions of key social challenges of the day, such as authoritarianism, international migration, under/development, and inequalities around race, gender, and class. With the exception of a recent flurry of work on mega-events, geographers have been absent from many of these discussions – despite making individually important interventions. With a two-pronged focus on sport and the politics of space at the state and sub-state scales, Critical Geographies of Sport illustrates the critical and innovative research currently underway in geography and among sports studies scholars interested in the spatial dimensions of sport. Hoping to promote a wider interdisciplinary discussion that may lay the groundwork for developing unique perspectives on sport and politics, the book encompasses a range of theoretical approaches to incorporating and foregrounding questions of power in the use – and abuse – of sport, sporting rhetoric, and athletic spectacles.

As the social sciences increasingly coalesce around critical theory, an exceptional opportunity to broaden geography’s engagement with scholars in other fields presents itself. So, while geography is an enormously diverse field, it has also begun to unite around the umbrella concept of “critical geography” – indexing theoretical inclinations as diverse as Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, postmodernism, Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralism, and actor-network theory. So dominant is this approach today that it is hard to imagine any current geographic scholarship that is not “critical.” While a number of these frameworks have ossified into solid subfields (e.g., “critical geopolitics,” “critical race studies,” and “critical cartography”), the field of geography has not yet systematically analyzed the subject of sport from this critical vantage point. Treating this situation as an opportunity to push beyond the early work of John Bale and others, Critical Geographies of Sport builds upon the diverse theoretical traditions encapsulated by the “critical turn” to envision a more critical sports geography that foregrounds power and the production of space.

The spatial lens that geographers typically emphasize in their work forms the foundation of what the discipline can offer to the wider study of sport. Additionally, critical social theory’s emphasis on theorizing power as produced and performed at multiple scales – especially Michel Foucault’s (1980, 1982) “capillary” understanding of power, and Bruno Latour’s (2005) network-based approach to power – has increasingly led other disciplines to undergo their own “spatial turn.” Central to this volume’s focus, these advances have together radically transformed academic treatments of politics by giving impetus to the serious study of key cultural institutions (Dittmer 2010) – such as sport. By decentering traditional approaches to politics as an elite phenomenon, critical theory has enabled scholars to consider the unique ways that sport is bound up with the production of power relations. Take, for example, the issue of how gender is engaged by scholars in this volume. The effort that geographers make to foreground the political production of space means that the role of sporting spaces in (re)producing gender hierarchies are woven into the varied analyses here – with nearly all of the chapters addressing the issue in some manner. This is a seemingly small but important difference from the central place gender or female sports are given in gender in sports sociology (e.g., Burstyn 1999; Hargreaves 1994, 2000; Hargreaves and Anderson 2014; Messner 2007).

Adopting a resolutely spatial lens, this volume does not just assert the merits of such an approach, but the individual chapters serve as solid examples of the diverse manner in which this research might actually be conducted. The basic assumption running through every chapter is that sport is inherently political – an approach that has been well established in the critical work on the sociology of sport (Hallinen and Jackson 2008; Giulianotti 2015; Marjoribanks and Farquharson 2012; Sugden and Tomlinson 2002). While much of the existing geographic research on sport has centered on questions of space and place (e.g., Bale 1993; Eichberg et al. 1998; Vertinsky and Bale 2004), this work has not always foregrounded critical questions of power. Or, in other words, instead of making key arguments about the working of power and the politicized production of space, sports geographers have tended to make empirical and theoretical contributions about the nature of sport itself. While this approach is not necessarily problematic in and of itself, it has meant that sport-focused researchers have not always been able to assert the wider relevance of their work to those who are not interested in sport or who fail to see its sociopolitical importance. In this volume, we demonstrate that by highlighting the relationship between sport and power, sports geographers are better positioned to answer the key question constantly posed to all scholars: “so what?” In justifying the significance of critical geographies of sport, we are also pressed to answer the question: “for whom?” Discussed at length in my conclusion with David Jansson, suffice it to say here that, in answering these questions, power must necessarily be at the heart of our concerns if we are to properly account for our own positionality as researchers, our relationship to those with whom we work, and our audiences (Pryke et al. 2003).

As approached in this volume, power relationships are generally understood to be both enabling and constraining, and to have both “positive” and “negative” expressions (Foucault 1980). As noted already, holding in focus these more positive expressions of power is especially important in the study of sport because of the impression of innocence and delight that Tuan (1984) attributes to the “world of play.” It is fair to say that the academic dismissal of sport is often rooted in some of the same dichotomies between work/play or politics/aesthetics which Tuan challenges in his radical search for power and domination beyond the oft-studied spaces of politics and economics. Although many of our colleagues may still hold onto this dualistic worldview, scholars of sport have long since moved beyond the deceptive innocence of play and illustrated the many injustices and subtle political agendas that infuse our favorite pastimes, “installed in the territory of our pleasure” (Billig 1995: 125). But rather than being accorded an a priori normative status, the chapters in this collection show that power relationships always have the potential for both “positive” and “negative” outcomes, depending on different individuals’ positionality and socio-political context.

Beyond the basic assumption that power is not only “repressive,” our aim is not to pin down any one definition of power or political agenda for the future of critical geographies of sport; the aim of this volume is to preserve the theoretical plurality that each of the contributors brings to bear on their individual research questions. This is especially important because sports geography has historically tended toward a rigid dogmatism that has resulted in the field being...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: critical geographies of sport in global perspective
• Part I Sports, geopolitics, and state space
• Part II Sports, community, and urban space
• Conclusion
• Index