We’re all transnational now: sport in dynamic sociocultural environments (original) (raw)

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 sportnation 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 sportingsocietal 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 multidimensional, 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. Introduction: sport within and beyond nations Sport is a social institution and cultural form that derives much of its symbolic power from the idea of nation while, for over two centuries, increasingly exceeding the boundaries of the national in material and symbolic form (Bairner 2001). For this reason, to talk about sport in 'transnational contexts' is, in effect, to embrace all contemporary sport, including those that are highly local and more 'folk'-oriented (such as kabbadi, kho kho, jukshei and pelota) but cannot be isolated from external sporting forces. It may be more or less national, transnational or global in nature, but to be defined as sport-in short, rationalized, regulated, competitive physical play-is inevitably to be implicated in the realm of the supranational. This article is principally concerned with those sports that are most regulated, commercialized and mediated. Sport in the twenty-first century is pulled in different directions, appealing, especially when involving international competition, to nationalist frameworks and impulses, while, especially in the light of its digitally-facilitated mediation (Hutchins and Rowe 2012), creating myriad connections and points of identification. A double movement,