Skip to content

Sport and Leisure Cultures Potential Projects

If you are interested in any of these projects, please contact the supervisors to discuss it:

The cultural politics of social justice/anti-discrimination campaigns in and through football 

Supervisors: Dr Dan Burdsey; Dr Jayne Caudwell  

Synopsis: A critical socio-cultural analysis of the scope and effects of social justice/anti-discrimination campaigns (e.g. anti-racism, anti-homophobia) in football communities and cultures. The project encourages an in-depth, rigorous and critical study of social justice/anti-discrimination campaigns attached to football at all levels of the game (local, national and international) and within its many communities. More specifically, a focus on the functioning of Western neo-liberalism and concomitant approaches to identity and difference. Through an engagement with the intersectionalities of ethnicities, genders and sexualities, the candidate might, for example, take a comparative approach to identities, subjectivities, spaces, places and contexts or an historical perspective and a genealogical analysis of power.

 3 Potential Projects in the Area of Football 4 Peace:  Supervisory teams/expertise:

Professor John Sugden is internationally recognized as an expert in sport and international relations, particularly in the spheres of sport in divided societies and sport in conflict resolution and peace building in the Middle east and elsewhere. He is widely published in these areas and leads an EU funded co-existence programme in Israel and Jordan. He would act as lead supervisor for either project 1 or 2 along with any of the following: Dr Udo Merkel; Dr Thomas F. Carter; Dr Dan Burdsey; Dr Mark Keech. Project 3 would see Professor Sugden team up with Dr Jayne Caudwell, an internationally recognized expert on sport, feminism and women’s rights. The execution of any of the suggested projects will benefit greatly from and be facilitated through an existing and extensive network of contacts in the sporting firmament at all levels in both Israel and the Palestinian authority.

 Project 1.  Sport and the Contested Making of Nations in the Middle East: Comparing Israel and Palestine

 In the shadow of the Holocaust and against a backcloth of a bloody, post-colonial civil war and struggle for independence the state of Israel came into being in 1948. While this was a great cause for celebration among the global Jewish Diaspora, in equal measure it was catastrophe for the indigenous Palestinian population upon whose land the fledgling Israeli state would take shape. The minority of Palestinians who remained in Israel were marginalised by the state building process, while the majority who migrated to the West Bank and Gaza Strip were destined to become an ambiguously stateless people marooned in an enclave that grew to become the Palestinian Authority. In the process of building the robust political and civil society institutions upon which a sustainable nation state depends, the Israelis understood how important it was to have strong sporting institutions around which to cement internal national identity and to project that identity in the international sphere. Thus, initially, as the disenfranchised Palestinians and their allies sought to destroy the Israeli state, the Israeli’s themselves used sport as one part of a complex tool kit through which that state could be secured and strengthened.  Learning from this, as arguments for a ‘two state solution’ gained ground post-1980s, the Palestinians themselves realise how important sport could be in the fostering of a distinctive national identity and in making of a separate Palestinian state. This study will compare and contrast the historic role played by sport in the making of the Israeli nation with the more contemporary efforts of the Palestinian Authority to harness sport in their struggle for independence within the framework of an equitable ‘two state solution’. 

Project 2:  Sport and the Making of the Palestinian Nation

 On 23 September 2011 President Mahmud Abbas submitted an application for Palestine to be accorded full member status in the United Nations. Whatever the outcome of this initiative, membership of the UN alone will neither guarantee the birth of the Palestinian State nor determine its long-term survival. To achieve this significant efforts will have to be made to ensure that the national project is supported through the continued growth and development of a sustainable structure of civil society and cultural institutions, such as the law, health and welfare, education, the arts, and, the focus of this proposal, sport. Sport is already playing a significant role in the making of the Palestinian nation. Next to membership of the UN, being recognized as a world player by global sports governing bodies is the most sought after emblem of national independence and status. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) accepted Palestine’s application for membership in 1995. Palestine has sent delegates to the Summer Olympic Games since Atlanta in 1996, with the first four competitors taking part in Beijing 2008. A Palestinian team will take part in the London Olympics in 2012. The world governing body of football, Fifa, accepted the Palestinian FA’s application for full membership in Paris in 1998 and currently both men’s and women’s senior teams represent the nation in the international arena. Membership of the club of international sport governing bodies does not guarantee success on the world stage. Despite the symbolic euphoria, currently the Palestinian men’s team languishes in 161st place in the Fifa rankings of its 203 members and Palestinian Olympians are yet to come close to winning a medal. This study will explore two issues: firstly the role played by sport hitherto in Palestine’s quest to build its own nation; secondly, it will ask what more needs to be done through sport to help to frame and project a distinctive Palestinian national identity, independent of Israel, recognized and fully endorsed by the international community?

 Project 3: Women’s Football and the Making of the Palestinian Nation

Next to membership of the UN, being recognized as a world player by global sports governing bodies is the most sought after emblem of national independence and status. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) accepted Palestine’s application for membership in 1995. The world governing body of football, Fifa, followed suit and accepted the Palestinian FA’s application for full membership in Paris in 1998. In 2008 Fifa took the further step of  endorsing the international status of a women’s team for Palestine and the following year the Faisal al Husseini football stadium in the West bank was packed with 10,000 mainly spectators for the national women’s team first ever full international against neighbouring Jordan. Most of these supporters were women. The story of the growth and development of the Palestinian women’s football team is as complex as it is fascinating, involving issues of global sports governance, national self-determination, social justice, religious freedom, and women’s rights in the context of an ongoing political and military occupation by Israel. With unprecedented access to the key figures involved in the formation of the Palestinian women’s football team, this study proposes to fully explore these and related issues to construct a critical narrative around the role of women’s football in the making of the Palestinian nation.

 2 Potential Projects Lifestyle sports:  Supervisory teams/expertise:

Dr. Belinda Wheaton is an internationally recognised expert in lifestyle sport cultures. She has published widely in these areas, and has had success in attracting high quality students and researchers to Brighton in these areas e.g.  Leverhulme scholar Dr Holly Thorpe, Georgina Roy ESRC  research studentship (on-going). Dr Wheaton would act as the lead supervisor along with either Dr Dan Burdsey, Dr Jayne Caudwell, or  Dr Paul Gilchrist, depending on the student’s specific emphasis.  It would also be possible to have joint supervision with Sociology (e.g Dr Jayne Raisborough (School of Applied Social Science), who has published widely on women’s serious leisure), or Professor Neil Ravenscroft (School of Environment and Technology).

 Lifestyle sports and the politics of difference

 Since their emergence in the 1960s, lifestyle sport cultures have experienced unprecedented growth and transformation, outpacing the growth of many traditional sport cultures across many Western nations.  Their increasing impact on the broader sporting culture, in terms of both participation, and as mediated spectacle and lifestyle practice is undeniable.  Furthermore, there is evidence of their increasing impact outside of the Global North (e.g. Brazil, Africa, Asia), and amongst groups of previously marginalised participants (e.g. the ‘silver surfers’).  While the academic literature on a range of lifestyle sports and alternative body cultures has proliferated (from base- jumping, snowboarding and skateboarding, to  parkour and pilates) much of this has focused on Western white young male participants.  We need research to understand the experiences of those to-date marginal voices, including; those outside of the global North, older participants, racialised minorities, and those with disabilities. In particular:

  •          What are their experiences of belonging and exclusion?
  •          Are these sites where traditional sporting identities, discourses and forms of embodiment, are challenged?

 Lifestyle sport and Sport- for - Development

The use of sport in various development and peace initiatives has proliferated over the past decade, from the local level to internationally based projects and NGO’s.  While many of these have used the international currency of activities like football, there are an increasing number adopting a broader range of physical cultural activities to develop their broader political, peace, education and health agenda.  Within this lifestyle sport cultures are emerging as tools for development such as in Skatistan and Surfing 4 Peace (that “aims to bridge cultural and political barriers between surfers in the Middle East.)  Skatistan is  a  Kabul-based Afghan NGO started in 2009, with educational and skateboarding  facilities for girls and boys. It is now an internationally based and supported organisation, and is developing similar initiatives in Cambodia, and Mazar-e-Shari.  Organisations like Skatistan provide the researcher with an opportunity to ask questions about:

a)     Whether, as some commentators have claimed, lifestyle sports are less competitive/combative and with their trans-national subcultural rather than national affiliations, are more inclusive than traditional sports enabling them to be remoulded to new communities.

b)     Do lifestyle sport such as surfing and skateboarding  offer young people different opportunities,  and life/educational skills than more traditional sport (e.g. as in team sport-based programmes such as Football 4 Peace).

c)     Explore issues around gender and ethnicity.  It has been argued that many peace and development project perpetuate traditional gender ideologies, whereas Skatistan in Afganistan has been particularly successful in attracting girls.