Wits Centre for Diversity Studies

8th International Conference

Call for Abstracts

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) will host a virtual international conference on 13-14 October 2022 on the theme:

Playing with/as the political: Sport as a field for politics, power, difference and resistance

Sport is normatively cast as virtuous; something to view, enjoy, participate in, develop community around, and distract from the realities of everyday life. Throughout history, in its various forms and practices, sport has been exalted as a portentous and unifying experience for communities and nations. Think of the narratives around India's win in the 1983 Cricket World Cup which sensitized India about its potential as a country, the 1971 U.S.-China ping-pong exchange which transformed American perceptions of "Communist" China or Nelson Mandela's conciliatory support of South Africa's rugby team, the Springboks, long a symbol of white Afrikanerdom, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

In our day-to-day, we are wont to celebrate sport for nurturing teamwork, enhancing physique and building character. Sport makes for a pastime, albeit one which triggers all sorts of emotions in spectators, audiences, and players while forming bonds and networks in both the physical and virtual realms. Hence, there are fan clubs and social media sport communities which keep members captivated and engrossed in player abilities, physique, statistics and scores, even when games are not being broadcast. The question of who better Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo is, the death of Kobe Bryant, the Olympics and so on dominate conversations in several countries, including some of the most remote places in the world. The cumulative effect of this is a mass, global population which sees sport as a vital part of our societies, cultures and lives. In these ways and others, sport is seen as a force transcending ideological, cultural, racial and social boundaries.

Sport, however, like all social and cultural phenomena, is deeply implicated in power relations. While the above reasons for the exaltation of sport are true and deeply felt by many, they often conceal the role and function of unequal power relations. In sport, we can see how the gender binary is used to exclude transgender women from competing, how colonial cultures of toxic masculinity and racism are perpetuated, how the glorification of violence is normalized through entertainment, and how nationalism, ethnicism, and anti-black racism are fostered and normalised through the sense of belonging and community created by particular sporting organisations or teams. These realities are not accidental, but rather reflect the deep embeddedness of inequities in all aspects of social life, including sport. What makes the analysis of sport particularly compelling is how deeply sports are embedded in our daily lives, yet they are rarely subjected to scrutiny, particularly from a critical diversity lens. 

Whenever human beings come together, for sport or otherwise, power differences and diversity issues come into play. We can think of how loyalties mobilized along lines of nationalism and ethnicity arise in stadia where fans supporting different football teams clash or how intersecting forms of dominance, such as racism, sexism, ableism, tribalism, and nationalism, are enacted, reproduced and even resisted in and outside the field of play. Considered in this way, the sporting arena literally and symbolically becomes a field for the expression of individual and collective politics, power, difference, and resistance. Conversely, political, economic and social issues constantly circulate, making their way into the sports field. Recently, FIFA, the federation that controls world football, has been embroiled in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to the point where sport has equally become a battleground for various European interests directly and indirectly involved in the conflict. This has led to debates on the relationship between sport and politics and whether it is possible to draw a line separating the two. While these affirm the entanglement of sport and politics, we remain cognizant of the absence of sustained and systematic critiques of the power differences and diversity issues that pervade the sporting arena particularly during the mundane participation in, viewership of, networking in, sponsorship of and broadcasting of sport. Despite the issues of systemic inequality that operate through its material and discursive dimensions, sport often evades critical interrogation during efforts to make sense of social dynamics that reproduce, resist, and reframe asymmetries of power. 

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS 

This conference looks forward to opening critical conversations about the forms of dominance, resistance and subversion that operate in the fields of sports and leisure while also considering the socio-cultural transformative contribution of these activities in society and across social imaginaries. We invite conversations on how, through sport, the narratives on gender and sexuality across diverse geographies and topographies have generated multiple forms of discourse, resistance and agency to unpack rights, duties and voices of socially, culturally and sexually marginalized communities. We wish to expand the process of unpacking beyond specific communities, races, religious groups, theories, philosophies, phenomenology, rhetoric, and jargon. This expansion requires us to explore the repertories of gendered, racial, ethnic, national, geographical and sexualized marginalization that happen in the sporting arenas where traditional approaches have not tapped into and, hence, perpetuated ignorance. Such ignorance is systematically, epistemologically, and structurally hidden and regularized through everyday performances by bodies at play. 

Sport also transcends the playing field to the gym, the magazine, the television screen and the kitchen. Being athletic, healthy and fit is often considered a desirable human trait according to different criteria of norms of the gendered human body. This conference also invites papers on the production and representation of the athletic, healthy and fit body across different spaces and forms. It also seeks papers that examine the connection between the body and culinary preferences. Diets and eating regimes are also connected to consequent body frames of male and female, and the non-gender conforming body. The conference therefore seeks to discuss the function of sport, athleticism and culinary practices within existing gender and sexuality power structures. 

Lastly, sport also affords us an opportunity to examine the human and how we interact with our natural environment, including our relationship to physical places and other life forms. For instance, where do we draw the line between animal torture and entertainment in sporting activities involving animals? How do sports such as race horsing blur the line between the human and the animal? By critically examining such forms of sport, we explore the links across human entertainment, animal abuse, capital gain and so on. We also remain conscious of how sport also serves as an arena for the protection of animal rights. The case of Kurt Zouma, a French football player who was sanctioned by the English Premier League board following a disturbing image on social media where he is seen kicking his cat, illustrates this. 

We in invite delegates from across the globe to engage with the following questions: 

1. What can critically examining sports tell us about the construction and perpetuation of hierarchies of difference?
2. How might we better grasp the nuances and mechanizations of power through such an analysis?
3. What can we learn from resistance in sport?
4. How might the ideals of unity, belonging and transformation in sport be challenged as obfuscations of power and reformulated as tools toward justice?
5. What can be said about the relationships between sport, athleticism, diet, entertainment, politics, economies and societies?
6. How does sport inform on going conversations on the animate, human and post-human?
7. What can we make of sport as 'the opium of the people' in the present world?

We invite papers that focus on but may not be limited to the following themes:

• Gender binaries and anti-trans sentiments in various sports
• Politics of gender and sexuality in sport and leisure
• Racism, colonial histories, and legacies of sport
• The mediation of toxic masculinities and sexual violence through sports
• Class dynamics, capitalism in sport and leisure,
• Disability and ableism in sport and leisure
• Sport as a performance of war and pursuit of conquest
• The construction of normative and (un)desirable bodies through sport
• Sport, leisure and tribalism, ethnicity and nation-building
• The normalisation of violence in sport throughout history and today
• Mega sport events, sportwashing and their impact on local spaces, environments and communities
• Athletics, diets, gym and normative bodies
• Sport, neoliberalism and economies
• Decolonial critiques or appraisals of sport
• Sport as the will to power
• Sport and the natural environment

This is the first call for abstracts, which are due on 31 August 2022. Abstracts should be between 250 and 300 words, accompanied by a single paragraph author biography. Kindly send to: conference.wicds@wits.ac.za

Keynote speakers will be confirmed soon...