Dr Davide Sterchele

Following the success of its all-male refugee football team, the Italian voluntary-based association Liberi Nantes created a touch rugby team as a pilot project aimed at involving female forced migrants. Initially set up as an all-woman activity to provide a less intimidating environment, the touch rugby group was later turned into a mixed-sex team. While potentially enabling transformative experiences and generating opportunities for challenging gender stereotypes, the mixed-gender character of the touch rugby provision also served broader objectives within Liberi Nantes’ mission. Focusing on the accounts of the activists and volunteers involved in the project, this paper investigates the practical and symbolic reasons for the strategic use of mixed-gender sport and its implications. Notably, by analysing the development of the touch rugby team, we highlight how its mixed-gender nature contributes to nourishing a wider rhetoric of social mixing and celebration of diversity, in which Liberi Nantes’ identity is embedded.

The article explores the encounter between parkour as an unstructured and culturally innovative practice, challenging both physical as well as organisational spaces, and UISP (Unione Italiana Sport per Tutti / Sport for All Italian Union) as a sport promotion body open to organisational and cultural experimentation. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative approach (analysis of documentary material, interviews and focus groups), we look at the role of UISP in the diffusion and legitimation of parkour within the Italian context, investigating the interplay between the cultural and organisational logics of both this new practice itself on the one hand, and the organisations that are trying to accommodate it on the other. The incorporation in a sport-for-all organisation like UISP provides traceurs with a safe and legitimised space, which is however ‘loose’ enough to maintain the fluidity of the practice. Nonetheless, by enabling the coexistence of different and competing definitions and uses of parkour, this fluid organisational space reproduces tensions among traceurs and weakens their voice in UISP’s decision-making processes.

Although many initiatives use sport as a tool to blur boundaries and foster social mixing, the way physical activity is organised and displayed for such purposes suggests critical refl ections about the potential of sport in terms of social inclusivity. When used for social purposes, mainstream sports often need to be adapted and partially de-structured by downplaying their competitive dimension, blurring categorisations through mixedgender, mixed-age, mixed-ethnic, or mixed-ability teams, and reducing the distinction between players and spectators. Therefore, while the process of sportization has re-shaped old forms of play and games, re-framing them as sports, when it comes to using physical activity to foster sociability the tendency seems to be the other way around, meaning that sports are re-shaped (or de-shaped) into mere games and even less structured forms of play. Drawing on both fi eldwork carried out by the author and the main literature in the field, the paper provides a theoretical and analytical exploration of such a de-sportizing trend.

On Saturday 19 October 2013, Davide Sterchele (Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University Carnegie Faculty) was interviewed on the BBC Radio World Series show ‘Sportshour' on Bosnia-Herzegovina's qualification for the 2014 Football World Cup.

The difficulties with interfaith dialogue are linked, at least in part, to the lack of ritual forms (consisting of rules, ceremonial idioms, liturgy, and repertoires of action) designed to unite and integrate the "meta-group "formed by the various religious communities. By means of ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author studied the mechanisms with which, under particular conditions, some forms of collective ritual were able to create opportunities for the re-integration of the Bosnian population, which had been profoundly divided after the terrible war of 199295. Comparing the forms of religious rituals and those of sports ritualsin particular, of football ritualsthe author develops some considerations that can be applied to the general debate about inter-religious dialogue. The comparison brings to light some of the limits and difficulties that religious institutions encounter in giving life to an interfaith dialogue that directly and concretely involves the members of different communities. © 2007 Social Compass.

With the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), each ethno-national group - Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats - set up its own football federation and began to organize its own competitions separately. Nevertheless, under strong pressure from FIFA, UEFA and the IOC, the three football establishments finally agreed to merge into a unified Bosnian Football Federation in 2002 and to organize the Premijer Liga, the first united Bosnian post-war championship. Drawing on ethnographic studies conducted in BiH since 2003, the paper examines the consequences of such a revamped inter-ethnic competition both in terms of the re-integration of the Bosnian population, on the one hand, and the possible exacerbation of ethnic tensions, on the other. It is concluded that the reunification of the Bosnian football's landscape helps to demonstrate how ethnicity is instrumentally used by the post-war élites to exploit the common good for private enrichment. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

© 2013 Taylor & Francis. This paper examines how social mixing and celebration of diversity can be enabled through sports festivals marked by their carnivalesque atmosphere. Our analysis draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Anti-racist World Cup), a non-competitive football tournament and intercultural festival featuring the yearly participation of hardcore football fans (ultras), migrant groups, third-sector associations and other informal groups. We consider how the multifocal ritual form of the event helps to create a liminal space in which discrimination and stereotypes can be temporarily challenged. The sources of collective effervescence are multiplied by placing sport games within a wider range of other leisure and cultural activities, thus promoting internal diversity and the inclusion of outsiders. Additionally, social boundaries are also blurred by not emphasising the competitive dimension of the sporting activities, making sporting categorisations more fluid, and breaking down the separation between protagonists and spectators. Nonetheless, considering the transient character of liminality, we also investigate problems and limitations implied by the pursuit of these objectives. It is concluded that, despite a certain degree of self-referentiality, the festival fosters the spreading of anti-discriminatory cultures by enhancing the participants’ reflexivity and feeding their commitment in generating spin-off activities in different local contexts.

English is increasingly the dominant language of academic scholarship. This means that much research produced in other languages is overlooked, a tendency strengthened by the growing power of global publishers and university ranking systems. This initial scoping study provides an exploratory review of non-English scholarship in the field of event management, drawing on an extensive literature search in Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish. We find a considerable number of event management publications in these languages, which effectively represent a ‘missing body of knowledge’ for scholars working in English. Only about 10% of these non-English sources are covered by Scopus, for example. Our scoping study indicates that this excludes many scholars and potentially interesting areas of work from the global event management corpus. We suggest several strategies which could be employed to address these issues.

Tourism experiences, memories thereof, and their consequences tend to be analysed separately, often focusing on the individual’s perspective. This paper introduces Collins’ (2004) interaction ritual (IR) theory to develop a micro-sociological interpretation of these phenomena as interconnected elements of IR chains. A longitudinal qualitative study of a multi-cultural festival held in Italy, the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Anti-racist World Cup), is used to show how emotional experiences and patterns of collective action are reproduced by the returning attendees in their home communities through the trans-local appropriation of the event’s format. Findings lead to a revised model of IR chains to explain the trans-local dimension of transformational event tourism. The implications for wider application of IR theory within tourism are discussed.

In the last decades, parkour as an urban bodily practice has gained an extraordinary visibility in the global sportscape, thanks to its precocious mediatisation in blockbuster movies and documentaries, in internet video channels like Youtube, on websites and on social networks. In Italy, too, it has rapidly become popular among young people. The chapter examines the role of UISP (Unione Italiana Sport per Tutti, Sport-for-All Italian Union), the largest Italian sport-for-all organisation, in the diffusion and legitimation of parkour within the Italian context, which also becomes a way for UISP to legitimise itself as the hegemonic promoter of new/alternative sports in Italy. UISP managed to incorporate into its organisation a large portion of the parkour scene: in 2013 about 70 parkour groups and 1, 400 traceurs were formally affiliated, including some of the most active parkour groups in the national landscape. Despite its seemingly niche dimension, parkour has undergone a fast development within UISP when compared to other lifestyle practices, crossing the symbolic threshold of 1, 000 members in only two years (whilst, for instance, it took six years for skateboarding memberships to grow beyond that number). In reconstructing the stages of the (partial and still on-going) co-optation and incorporation of parkour within UISP, the chapter focuses in particular on the project known as ‘Spazio Indysciplinati’ (Undisciplined Space): the name of this project refers to the challenging character of the practices involved as well as to the difficulties to fit them into any existing Discipline-Leagues by which UISP is structured. Through workshops in 2010 and 2011 aimed at creating a think-tank of leaders of sport associations, simple sport practitioners and young people, the project first identified the new actors, spaces, sensibilities and trends in sports, bodily expression and movement. By intersecting other UISP projects including various street activities (juggling, parkour, street theatre, capoeira, skateboarding), Spazio Indysciplinati progressively emerged as a cultural and organisational space as open and fluid as the kind of sport and bodily activities covered. In 2013, the platform gave birth to the educational project ‘Percorsi Indysciplinati’ (Undisciplined Paths), founded on a law on Social Promotion and aimed at attracting young people to physical activity. New and potentially low-threshold activities were expected to contrast with inactive lifestyles offering opportunities for social participation and integration. Spazio Indysciplinati as a general frame and Percorsi Indysciplinati as a specific project had been monitored by the research group using a mix of qualitative tools such as interviews, focus groups and documentary and social network analysis. By analysing them with a specific focus on parkour, the chapter shows how the fluid and unstructured nature of lifestyle sports contributes to unveiling and problematising the rigidity of the organisational logics that characterise even an innovative organisation like UISP, opening up an arena for the definition of its cultural politics in relation to youth participation, uses of urban space, social inclusion and community-building effects.

Whilst being the world’s fastest growing informal sport, parkour is also undergoing a gradual institutionalisation which is shaped differently by each national context’s specific sport system. We investigate this glocalised process by examining the subcultural tensions and power struggles it generates within the Italian parkour community. Whilst in other countries parkour practitioners (the so-called traceurs/traceuses) have managed to gain public recognition by forming a specific and independent national governing body, in Italy they are gradually affiliating with different Sport Promotion Bodies (Enti di Promozione Sportiva), the distinctive umbrella organisations which compete for the provision of sport-for-all within the country. Through a qualitative mixed-method approach based on focus groups, individual interviews and the analysis of ethnographic and documentary material, we explore the institutionalisation of Italian parkour by focusing on the controversies surrounding the introduction of teaching standards and qualifications, which is becoming a battlefield between competing authenticity claims based on different visions and interpretations of parkour. Our analysis shows how sport policymakers become influential agents in this authentication process by (often unwittingly) favouring certain forms and meanings of the practice and thereby contributing to legitimising certain practitioners over others, distributing subcultural reputations and shaping hierarchies in the field. Moreover, by highlighting how the specific characteristics of the Italian sport system contribute to increasing tensions amongst traceurs but also stimulate discussion and pluralism, this study calls for future comparative analysis of the role of policymakers in the local re-contextualisation of highly globalised practices.

Emerging from my decade-long qualitative research programme and intersecting emic roles of events practitioner, events academic, and priest, this exegesis articulates my innovative reconceptualization of Pfadenhauer’s (2010) initial ‘Eventization of Faith’ construct. Illuminating the nuances resulting from denominational theological differences in the use of sacred spaces for events, my conceptual development enables faith communities to consider their strategic positioning and practical event processes to facilitate holistic local event programming. Incorporating critical analysis of relevant literature, my research on eventization of faith demonstrates transcendence beyond the marketing limitations ascribed by Pfadenhauer and Hitzler. My work establishes that whilst the core motivational aim of intentional Christian faith event activity is mission and evangelism, it is complexified by a plethora of interconnected event purposes, with varied theological perspectives and local contexts influencing each event management element. Church denominations and traditions have established diverse moral, ethical and theological boundaries regarding appropriate use of sacred space, a vital factor that especially complexifies secular event usage following venuefication. The resulting considerations, models and processes enable local faith communities to situate themselves strategically in events practice, minimising reputational and financial risks. The naming of the concept is critically assessed, justifying the broader terminology of ‘faith’ rather than ‘church’. Being based on ancient, traditional, and mega-church event spaces and practices, my research presents a vital lens enabling diverse faiths to consider their strategic values, policies and resources in delivering operational offerings. Practical theology invites a theological reading of the events engagement of churches, contributing to the justification of the ethnographic methodological choices that shaped my research into the life of church communities. Reflecting Ziakas’ (2023) ontological invitation to critical event studies, my academic, professional practice, and embedded faith perspectives facilitated analysis of numerous events, in multiple European locations, across denominations and theological traditions.

Sustainable tourism has become, for many, a buzzword and a tool for greenwashing. Often its ethical principles are developed in institutional and commercial tourism outlets with insufficient efforts to meaningfully implement such principles. Within this context, our study examines the transition from sustainable tourism policies driven by economic growth to sustainability approaches embedded in regenerative, non-hierarchical ecologies. We analyse the potential for this shift as framed by Norwegian (national) and Sámi (indigenous) tourism stakeholders. To do so, we compare the official Norwegian tourism strategy, and the sub-strategy commissioned to the Sámi parliament. The study adopts a multi-method approach consisting of critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the Norwegian and Sámi tourism documents and semi-structured interviews with tourism policy-makers. This approach sheds light on the issue of power inherent in tourism discourses, particularly by examining how language sustains or exacerbates dominant political, economic, and social roles and relations. Findings highlight a significant gap between the sustainability discourses that inform the official tourism policy and the regenerative perspectives underpinning the indigenous approach to tourism. The study reveals that embracing Sámi insights, which embody regenerative principles through deep ecological connections and community-focused values, could offer a valuable, inclusive and meaningful path for Norway’s tourism development.

Volunteer tourism has long represented a fruitful realm for the application of geographic perspectives and has greatly benefitted from them. Yet, despite the progress made through multi-, inter-, and intra-disciplinary approaches to the field, its development has notably slowed down and reached a stagnation phase. This is because much scholarship on volunteer tourism has focused on rather dichotomic conceptualisations of the field, and because of a lack of engagement with the intertwined challenges of our times, whose combined effects characterise the current polycrisis. Hence, in this paper we provide an overview of how recent geographic approaches to volunteer tourism have shown ways towards less rigid conceptualisations that better capture its fluid processes and dynamics. Subsequently, we discuss how geographic perspectives can help us make sense of the challenges faced by volunteer tourism in the current polycrisis, including those related to socio-ecological justice, capitalist ideologies, technological advancements, and intersectional inequalities. After looking at the possibilities offered by the application of digital geographies and geohumanities to our understanding of current and future volunteer tourism scenarios, we advocate for a posthuman theoretical shift. In particular, we suggest how this can help us rethink roles, practices, meanings and justifications of volunteer tourism in a rapidly changing world. In raising questions about the future development of volunteer tourism, the paper aims at sparking debates and stimulating collaborative efforts to drive meaningful advancements of the field.

In this study, we discuss the intersection between tourism and migration. In doing so we interrogate how tourism and migration meet, interrelate, overlap and merge in multifaceted and fluid ways. We draw upon literature on transnational migration and on Sarah Ahmed’s work on the relationship between ‘strange encounters’ and home. These theoretical perspectives enable us to move away from an ‘ontology of the stranger’ and polarised views on migration and tourism. We investigate these issues through semi-structured interviews with people with different migration backgrounds and migration-related experiences who revolve around the Sardinia tourism industry. Our discussion unveils the entrenched inequalities and unexpected resources that people with different experiences of migration live and mobilise to reconfigure and expand notions of home through their involvement in the tourism industry. Our discussion underlines how processes of regrounding and the shaping of transnational ties between countries of origin and migration can exceed the remit and frameworks of initiatives to ‘integrate’ migrants through tourism. Drawing on the participants’ accounts and experiences of uprooting and regrounding, we contend that different identities and multiple notions of home can emerge from the uneven relationship between tourism and migration.

In this methodology research letter, we describe the development, piloting and large-scale trial of an experimental concurrent group discussion approach. Specifically, we detail how we used provocative 2050 scenarios to ‘open up’ future thinking, facilitate multiple polylogues and efficiently collect large sample qualitative data. The method was trialled with 120 business tourism professionals at the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) conference in Glasgow in 2023. We conclude by reflecting on our learning from the large-scale trial and consider how this method can be developed for other tourism research applications.

This paper critically examines how future thinking is positioned in the mindset of event professionals through the lens of provocative far future scenarios. In debating these far future scenarios within a polylogue (multiple voices) framework, we explore how dianoetic (discursive reasoning) approaches can facilitate long-term ´civilisational´ thinking and capture stakeholder reactions and emotions to future event environments. As such, our study contributes comparative qualitative insights into how current and future industry professionals respond to the contradictions and complexities of event futures. Our findings have implications for industry resilience and strategic thinking at a time when Covid-19 pandemic recovery has coincided with other global economic challenges and unpredictable threats such as climate change. Our findings highlight the importance of developing effective tools to overcome emotional barriers to thinking about the future. They also reveal the importance of engaging a broad stakeholder demographic and learning from other sectors to diversify conversations about the future.