ABSTRACT
Sport has a deep, enduring attachment to nation as spatial anchor, governmental principle and romantic ideal while being simultaneously implicated in processes that strain, challenge and disrupt the sport-nation nexus. Sport institutions, practices and tastes move into new territories and, correspondingly, people relocate to national spaces where they must negotiate the terms of an established sporting-societal order in the context of a global ‘media sports cultural complex’. Sport, therefore, is compulsively transnational, unevenly global, and reflexively national in character by means of multi-dimensional, dynamic interplay. This article focuses on how the lives of ethnically diverse, urban and mobile human subjects in Australia are interwoven with sport in ways that illuminate its capacity symbolically to bind and separate citizens/residents to extant national formations. In addressing sport’s role in social inclusion/exclusion and cultural citizenship in demographically diverse societies, the article explores its positioning at the intersection of national symbols and material processes.
