Sport Mobilities: new directions and connections at the intersection of sport and mobilities research

Format: Hybrid paper session, accepting in-person and remote submissions.

Sponsor: We are seeking sponsorship from the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.

Session Convenors:

Simon Cook (Birmingham City University)
Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)
Diti Bhattacharya (Griffith University)
Jonas Larsen (Roskilde University)
 

Sport and mobility are inherently entwined. Sport is predicated on movement, and in turn, sport moves us physically, socially, and emotionally. Yet, while geographers have been more engaged with the movement cultures involved in sports (Andrews 2017; Latham and Layton 2020), engagements between sports studies and mobilities studies are rarer. Newman and Falcous first noted this ‘conspicuous absence’ in 2012 and reflected on the shared promise of the two fields, appealing for ‘sports studies writers to consider the scope of mobilities approaches and, in turn, for mobilities researchers to consider the oft-overlooked, unique and contingent world of sport as a rich site of enquiry’. While some progress has been made since, sport is still largely an undercurrent and ‘curious neglect’ (Larsen 2022) in mobilities research and vice-versa. Rarely does such work hold actual dialogue between mobilities and sport studies, thus the promise identified by Newman and Falcous is still to be richly fulfilled.

This session aims to intervene by bringing together work, ideas, and perspectives at the intersection of mobility studies and sport studies to further dialogue and collaboration between these fields. We, therefore, broadly invite papers that offer empirical, conceptual, methodological, reflective, review or agenda-setting contributions around ‘sport mobilities’ and consider the applications, promises, challenges, and possible directions for sport and mobility connections.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

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If you would like to submit a paper, please send abstracts (c.250 words) to Simon Cook (Simon.Cook@bcu.ac.uk).