ABSTRACT
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.
