The publishing silence of geographers on issues of sport is quite
understandable, in some cases.
Three years teaching students about the environment, social
responsibility, and related matters - students who were really attending
university to attend to their sporting careers and Sports Studies
degrees in the UK - demoralised me. So has watching the near-riot that
followed the Superbowl win in this town.
The nationalistic and often patriarchal fervour, racism, artificial 'feel
good' factor of the
'win', and huge flows of capital on team sports across the world are
worthy objects for geographic study and critical attention, as a small
group of scholars and PhD students have discovered.
A critical geography of sports, and the spatial, moral and financial
outcomes of sporting enthusiasms, could, however, find itself to be
EXTREMELY critical.
Simon Batterbury
visiting lecturer
Department of Geography
Campus Box 260
University of Colorado, Boulder
CO 80309-0260 USA
tel. 303 492 5388
fax. 303 492 7501
email [log in to unmask]
Web http://www.colorado.edu/geography/people/faculty.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 12:58:49 -0800 (PST)
From: John Bale <[log in to unmask]>
To: Lawrence Berg <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: Crit-Geog Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Disclosure
Resent-Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 13:02:28 +0000
Resent-From: [log in to unmask]
Resent-To: [log in to unmask]
Lawrie Berg wrote:
>
>Finally, am I reading too much into things, or is it particularly notable
>to see how 'sport' has colonised many of the disclosures?
>
> On other hand, the lack of interest in sport among geographers - especially CULTURAL
geographers - in their professional work remains astonishing. No paper explictly
focusing on the subject has ever been published in the AAG or TIBG . Oddly, this is far
from being the case in similar status journals in other disciplines. On the other hand I
sense that much of what Nigel Thrift has recently written about dance could be also
applied to sport. And the super chapter by Allan Pred on the Stockholm Globe in (plus his
earlier paper on the 'journey to spectate' at 19th.c. baseball games [Jnl of Hist Geog.
some yrs. ago] recognises the 'place' of modern sports. But in the end it seems that
non-geographers (e.g. Charles Springwood, 'From Cooperstown to Dyersville', and
Henning Eichberg, 'Body Cultures' [recently pub. by Routlege]) write the best
geographies of sports.
I think the mention of UK soccer club affliliations in many of the disclosures may say
more about the respondents (or their masculinities?) than anything else. Lawrie - this is
one of your fields; a response?
Cheers
John Bale
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[log in to unmask]
Department of Education
Keele University
Keele
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG
from UK - (01782) 583117
from abroad - +44 (782) 583117
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