Sport annually mobilizes millions of people across Europe: as practitioners in a wide variety of competitive, educational, or recreational contexts, and as spectators, who are physically present or following events through the mass media. This book presents original research into modern sport funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its aim is to examine the distinctive contribution made by this complex phenomenon to the construction of European identities. Attention is focused on sport's social significance, as a set of mass-mediated practices and spectacles giving rise to a network of images, symbols, and discourses. The book seeks to explore, and ultimately to explain, the processes of representation and mediation involved in the sporting construction, and subsequent renegotiation, of local, national, and, increasingly, global identities. It offers a survey of key developments in sporting Europe - from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and from the Atlantic to the Urals - presenting findings by acknowledged international experts and emerging scholars at the level of individuals, communities, regions, nation-states, and Europe as a whole, in both its geographical and political incarnations. Its focus on representation offers a broadly conceived, and consciously inclusive, approach to issues of 'Europeanness' in modern and contemporary sport.

Practiced and watched by billions, sport is a global phenomenon. Sport history is a burgeoning sub-field that explores sport in all forms to help answer fundamental questions that scholars examine. This volume provides a reference for sport scholars and an accessible introduction to those who are new to the sub-field.

The EUSB (European Sports Badge) is meant to target a large audience through popular sports. Modern sport and its various events have been originated in Europe during the past two centuries. Physical exercise and personal fitness are nowadays well-respected and truly popular. This study aims at responding to the question, to what extent popular sport can make a contribution to the genesis, the implementation, and the fostering of a mutually acknowledged and experienced EU-identity. A differentiation between the two main spheres of sport, professional sports and popular sports, shows that the official and documented emphasis of the EU on the professional sphere hitherto led to negligence and a misconceiving attitude towards mass sports so far.

Cities are both real and imaginary places whose identity is dependent on their distinctive heritage: a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. The essays in this volume, which originate from a lecture series at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, explore the complex and multi-layered identities of European cities. Themes that run through the essays include: nostalgia for a grander past; location between Eastern and Western ideologies, religions and cultures; and the fluidity and palimpsest quality of city identity. Not only does the book provide different thematic angles and a variety of approaches to the investigation of city identity, it also emphasizes the importance of diverse cultural components. The essays presented here discuss cultural forms as various as music, architecture, literature, journalism, philosophy, television, film, myths, urban planning and the naming of streets.

This book investigates the use of football to create, shape and promote Spanish, Catalan and Basque national identities and explores the utilization of soccer to foster patriotic feelings, exposing the often dark vested interests behind the propagation of national narratives through soccer.

This book explores several cultural and historical paths intertwined in the genesis and development of sport and physical activities within colonial and postcolonial contexts. As far as youth organizations and Western-based sports are concerned, the Independencies political split needs to be reconsidered, from a cultural perspective with practices overlapping spatial, chronological and epistemological borders. When looking at the variety of practices, the colonial legacies and the ensuing migration journeys through a global perspective, there is a need to understand the diverse ways of composing and building the postcolonial sport worlds. Multiculturalism (South Africa, France, Algeria), transnational journeys (Pacific Islands), rebuilding of national identities through sporting institutions (Ireland, West Africa), racialization of the society (Rwanda, South Africa), gender control (from the West-East to the North-South gap), sportization of traditional/old games (Americas), and so on. Following the various studies shaping this book, the ambivalence of sporting and physical activities’ paths comes up. It is apparent these trajectories have generated a mixed feeling of adhesion and repulsion towards Western hegemonies in postcolonial societies.

How do migrant youth negotiate their role in society through sport and leisure practices? How can political theory and qualitative critical research work together to make sense of these processes? These are among the questions that led to a long-term investigation of young males’ sport practices in Ireland, possibly the most fertile contemporary setting for the analysis of questions of sport and identity. Youth Sport, Migration and Culture emphasises the epistemological and ethical urgency of doing research with rather than on young people. Engaging with the social changes in Irish society through the eyes of children of immigrants growing up in Ireland, the book looks closely at young people’s leisure practices in multi-ethnic contexts, and at issues of inclusion in relation to public discourses around ‘national identity’ and immigration. Offering compelling analysis of how ideas of race and racism are elaborated through sport, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, sport development or youth culture.