Assessing the sociology of sport: On race and diaspora

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on the intersection of race and sport, Ben Carrington, reflects on the field as a whole and the notion of “diaspora” in understanding race and sport. In considering the trajectory of the sociology of sport, questions are raised about whether a coherent field has ever existed. Noting relative failures in getting “mainstream sociology” to take sport seriously, the challenges ahead are for a field that is necessarily a “multifaceted” entity, and one that ironically has never been more impactful while at its weakest institutional moment. Noting the paradox between the relative little consideration given to sport in the main sociology journals in the US and UK in contrast with the sociology of sport having successfully established self-reproducing and self-referencing spaces of critical enquiry, a key challenge for the field continues to be in its search for a “scholarly place;” it is less than clear whether the banner of “the sociology of sport” continues to resonate in the face of the neo-liberal assaults on critical scholarship within higher education. The concept of “diaspora,” surprisingly ignored in the study of sport, will be increasingly important in the future as it will enable critical race scholars to problematize the often Eurocentric and teleological underpinning of globalization theory in relation to sport; considerations of diaspora will fuel more meaningful accounts of how sport reconnects geographically dispersed groups and changes identities and subjectivities in hostile circumstances.