4th Bi-Annual Sport, Race and Ethnicity Conference

the 4th International Conference on Sport, Race and Ethnicity will be held at the Belfast Campus of the University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 27 – 30, 2012. The conference is hosted by the Sport and Exercise Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster.

The site
The site for the forthcoming Sport, Race and Ethnicity Conference is one of the most intriguing destinations for the study of sport and identity anywhere in the world. For most of the latter part of the twentieth century Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland was an international byword for ethnic division, conflict and violence. Amid this turmoil, lasting almost three decades, sport continued to exist, albeit in abnormal circumstances.

Sport and ethnicity
Instead sport came to reflect, exacerbate and occasionally promote division between the majority Protestant and Unionist population of Northern Ireland and the minority Catholic and Nationalist people, many of whom wished to see the unification of Northern Ireland with its neighbour the Republic of Ireland. Thus a key theme of the 4th SRE Conference will be the role of sport in the creation and promotion of ethnic identities and from that sport’s role in accentuating, ameliorating or merely marking out the degree of ethnic diversity increasingly evident across the world.

Sport and Race
Of course 2012 is also a hugely significant year for the United Kingdom as many of the world’s leading athletes descend upon London in the weeks immediately following the SRE conference. With this the opportunity to consider mega-events as a site for the interrogation of issues of race and ethnicity in modern sport is both appropriate and timely. On this theme one of the issues the conference will broadly consider is the possible revised ‘racial’ interpretations of athletic performance in the wake of China’s ascent to the top of the unofficial medal table at Beijing in 2008 (breaking down longstanding assumptions about ‘oriental’ physical inferiority by comparison to ‘African-American’ and ‘European’ representatives). Indeed arguably the same could be said around Latino ascendancy in Major League Baseball (the ‘American’ game) and/ or talented ‘white’ men playing in the NBA through and alongside the drafting of players from mainland Europe.

Visit the website of the Ulster University to register
Visit the website of Ulster University for the conference programme