GLOBALSPORT Blog
The Geography of Rugby in Buenos Aires: Class Inequalities through the Lens of Sports
31 January, 2018 by Sebastián Fuentes
Federico (a pseudonym) is a tall 23-year-old rugby player from Club Universitario de Buenos Aires (CUBA), located in northern Buenos Aires. He told me several times that professionalization was changing rugby, encouraging new people from the lower classes to the sport. Yet "rugby is still...
Lessons from the Favela: Sport and Social Exclusion in Rio de Janeiro
20 May, 2017 by Robert Malengreau and Daniel Guinness
The mere presence of thirty-two children from a Rio de Janeiro favela at the head office of Novavisão (all names are pseudonyms), a leading Brazilian architecture firm, encapsulated the inequalities of Brazilian society, even as it offered a momentary transcendence from them. The children's stories...
Between Magic and Medicine: Testing for Controlled Substances in Senegalese Wrestling
3 November, 2016 by Mark Hann
Since its introduction in 2004, WADA’s World Anti-Doping Code has become the primary tool in the worldwide struggle against doping in sport. It has established a consistent and standardized set of doping regulations, offering organizations a means to control performance enhancing substance use – ostensibly...
Beyond Colonialism: Contemporary Cricket Narratives in the Caribbean
4 October, 2016 by Adnan Hossain
Every year, male cricketers from many islands in the Caribbean migrate temporarily to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the richest country in the region, to play for Trinidadian cricket clubs. Trinidad, however, is not where they want to be. Many had originally aspired to...
Playing Football on the Margins: West African Football Players in Poland
25 September, 2016 by Paweł Banaś
Many young aspiring footballers in West Africa see participation in professional football, which has over the years become a global multibillion industry, as a pathway out of poverty and marginalization. Aspiring footballers join football academies that have recently mushroomed all over West Africa, hoping to...
Xam Sa Cossan, "Know your Heritage": Senegalese Wrestling and the "Rediscovery" of Ethnicity
19 September, 2016 by Mark Hann
It came as something of a surprise to me when Omar, an aspiring wrestler whom I had come to know during my fieldwork, revealed to me his Casamançais ancestry. Of course, there was nothing really surprising about the fact itself – Dakar's ever-expanding suburban areas...
Football Dreams, Pentecostalism and Migration in Southwest Cameroon
7 September, 2016 by Uroš Kovač
At Buea Young Star FC (a pseudonym), a football academy in Buea, the capital of the Southwest region of Cameroon where I conducted fieldwork between September 2014 and September 2015, training sessions always started and ended with a prayer. Typically, we would all come together...
Yëngël Gësëm - Wrestling with Hope
21 June, 2016 by Mark Hann
In spring 2015, GLOBALSPORT member Mark Hann teamed up with Senegalese filmmaker Mamadou Khouma Gueye with the goal of making a film about the hopes, desires, and lives of aspiring athletes in Senegal. The collaboration resulted in the ethnographic documentary "Yëngël Gësëm - Wrestling with...
Economies of Hope and Rugby Dreams in Rural Fiji
22 April, 2016 by Niko Besnier
In Fiji, the outside world profoundly and directly affects even small i-Taukei (indigenous) villages. As part of our fieldwork on the migration of Fijian rugby players, we visited one such village, which we will call Koromakawa, in the interior of Viti Levu, huddled around an...
Being a Good Friend: Practices of Borrowing and Lending Money Among Kenyan Runners in Japan
30 July, 2015 by Michael Peters
In a Tokyo suburb on the last Saturday in November, with afternoon showers knocking the remnants of autumn leaves off the maple and gingko trees, an unheralded track meet was held on a local university campus. After the rain receded, a magical mist hovered over...
A Wrestling Match in Guédiawaye, Senegal
18 April, 2015 by Mark Hann
The above video is an attempt to depict a Senegalese lamb (wrestling with punches) combat from the perspective of one of its protagonists, Modou Lô 2. The primary goal of making this video was to be able to give something back to Modou Lô 2...
The Battle for Talent? Sport and Contested Nationality
19 March, 2015 by Daniel Guinness
Each year, the national representative teams of Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland, Italy and France compete against each other in the Six Nations tournament, which is the Northern Hemisphere’s premier rugby union tournament. The selection of Gareth Anscombe to the Welsh rugby union squad for the...
Wrestling and Football in Dakar, Senegal
18 January, 2015 by Mark Hann
In Senegal, as across the rest of Africa, association football enjoys immense popularity. Young men wear Real Madrid or Barcelona jerseys as they go about their daily business, impromptu games can be witnessed on every street corner, and it is said that the only time...