NASSS 2018 Conference - Vancouver

If sport is a cultural performance (and of course it may be viewed as such) both broadly and narrowly, then its embodiment can be seen as analogous to performance art. Culturally, sport forms may follow Raymond Williams' rubric of residual, dominant, and emergent. Emergent sport processes may be likened to the avant garde, where new creations emerge out of old amalgamations, technological advances, and creative entrepreneurial efforts. This session invites papers that explore sport as an avant garde formation, in its many incarnations.  Papers submitted may be broad in scope, speculative, argumentative, philosophical, or more narrow, examining specific cases of sport where the proposed metaphor fails or succeeds.