Episode 17: Media, sport and place

The stadiums are produced within this sort of white spatial imaginary, and then they help to produce the kinds of bodies that identify with that white spatial imaginaries. Welcome to Struggles in the City, the podcast to understand power relations. I'm Melodyne Sommier. I'm working as an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Uwaskola in Finland, and our guest today is Helen Morgan-Palmet. She works as associate professor at the University of Vermont in the United States, and today she's joining me to talk about the interplay between media, sport and place. In your work, Helen, there is a notion that comes back a lot, and I thought we could maybe start from there, as I imagine that not many people are familiar with it. It's the notion of sportification of place. Would you want to start with it maybe and tell us like a brief definition of what it is to sort of lay the ground for what we're going to talk about today? Yeah, so this is a term, this phrase that I use in my work and in my upcoming book, Stadium City, to describe the coming together of media culture, sport and space, and particularly urban space. In this particular term, I'm drawing on the work in sociology that is about sportification and how particular practices are transformed into either sporting practices themselves. This refers to the longer process of sportization, where folk games were turned into more formalized systems of sport, with a set of rules and institutions, governing bodies, but it also refers to the ways in which non-sporting activities are also sort of turned into sport activities, that they're made more competitive for formative, and so there's a good amount of literature on sportification, but not really the ways in which that sort of plays out in terms of place. And media comes in here because I'm drawing on work of a folks like Lawrence Wenner and Soot Jolly, who talk about the ways in which media and sport are inextricably intertwined, particularly in the modern era, after practices of sportization as they become institutionalized, formalized. And so what my work is really looking at is how this aspect of media sports, those sort of intertwined institutions, come to produce and govern urban space, so that urban space and spatiality and the sort of bodies interacting with an urban space are transformed into kind of performative, active, theatrical, competitive spaces. So I'm really kind of trying to think through the ways in which the ontology of media sport comes to influence space in everyday life and ways beyond sort of official sport. Yeah, I think we get a clear sense from what you're saying of, well, obviously, what we're going to talk about today in the podcast, but also the interdisciplinarity of your work. You've mentioned sports, sociology, media. And it did when we, when I was reading what you've written, there are lots of things coming together. I was wondering if you could tell maybe a little bit about how you got to actually put those things together. And how maybe, as you tell us a bit about your own path into this topic, maybe it also gives room to sort of explain how looking at those things together kind of help look at things that otherwise maybe we wouldn't see, right? If we only had a sports sociology approach, for instance, but without the connection to city. So maybe how you got to bring those things together and what does it allow you to see? Yeah, absolutely. So in my dissertation research, I was initially interested in media in a post Katrina context in New Orleans, Louisiana. So after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, there was a lot of media representation of the storm itself and its effect on the city, but also a lot of like media happening in and around the city. And as I started to look at that media, it kind of struck me that the media, especially film and television was not just representing Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding process, but it was actively participating in it through production practices in particular. So my first book looked at the TV series Tremay, and that was filmed all on location in New Orleans on all around. And so I kind of looked at the ways in which on location shooting and tourism practices and hiring practices were actually part of the rebuilding and revitalization strategy in New Orleans. So that really was the first sort of part that got me to looking at how media doesn't just represent urban space in place or space in place more generally, but it participates in what Unreal F5 talks about in terms of the production of space. So it actually plays a sort of material role in the production of space. But a lot of the media studies research on space really focuses on representation. And there is a growing body of literature, was when I first started that book, trying to think about media and that more material sense, sort of non-representational theory of folks like Nigel Thrift, but also production studies, people like Becky Mayer and John Caldwell that are combining industry studies with cultural studies to look at production in that sort of material sense. And then two other sort of media studies focuses that started to sort of take this spatial turn are non-media centric media studies, that sort of try to think about media more as a kind of practice rather than as a sort of representation. And then media infrastructure studies, which tends to look at underwater fiber optic cables or telephone poles. And so those were all the sort of pieces of media studies that were sort of taking this more, I think probably non-media centric turn and sort of spatial turn. And so likewise in geography, there was increasing interest in media as well, but as also sort of more in that representational sense. But then there were sort of like material pieces there of sort of media geography developing with folks sort of asking those kind of spatial questions about media as well. So I've also sort of drawn on, like I mentioned Nigel Thrift, as well as some other folks from geography too. And then my sort of bringing in sport into this is that I accidentally booked a hotel room near a stadium district in Seattle. And I was really struck by the ways in which the stadium itself was a sort of media practice, right? That's a media production studio. There's media like all integrated into the experience of going to the stadium. And it has that a very kind of similar impact on contemporary urban space as media production in today's cities, especially film and TV production where it's sort of used by city governments and institutions as a method of rebuilding and revitalizing space in very particular ways that I thought was was not so much just so different actually from what was happening with a television show like Tremay and sort of big media production at Tremay. So I just started to become really interested in sports stadiums. And I'm actually not a sport person. I initially started this project with a colleague who was the person that writes a lot about sport, Kate Ranakin. But since we started the project, she left academia. And I, I kept kind of trying to put down this project and was like, Oh, maybe I'm not a sports person. But I, I just kept being struck by like more cities that I traveled to and how this was just happening everywhere. And it just felt like it was a book that needed to be written. So I kept, I kept on with it. Yeah, I think it's really, really interesting to hear kind of the serendipity as well, like when you say you accidentally booked that hotel room there and then sort of how the subject finds you, right? And it stayed with you even though you're trying to let go of it. Exactly. So common in research, I, I love it. Absolutely. You've mentioned stadiums, because in, in did your research looks at stadium, even though, I guess, sportification of place could be also in, in different places. But stadiums have something particular. Probably they bring together very concretely this interplay between sport media and place. As, as you've said, can you maybe still tell us a bit more about the mediatorization of, of stadiums and how media are built into them? You mentioned a few example, but if you could still open it up for us. Yeah. So in the book, I talk about how stadiums are at once media ties mediated and mediating. And that was sort of like a clicking moment for me that it wasn't just like stadiums that integrate media or our media production studios, but they're all of these things, right? So in terms of it being media ties, media is built into stadiums, largely through digitization, fiber optic cables, but also like huge screens, right? All over, right? Jumbotrons, halos, you know, small screens everywhere, but even like toilets are digitized, right? So the fiber optic cabling that enables you to access your Wi-Fi or the AI things that the AI chatbots that you can access. And all of these sort of mediated, mediatized aspects of this stadium can promise the fan this like frictionless fan experience where everything just sort of seamlessly flows and you don't have to really think about the being at the stadium as, as anything, like you're not running into any sort of problems. It just sort of smoothly unfold so that you can have this escapist experience. At the same time, stadiums are mediated. So they're mediated the production studios, right, where they're filming a sort of particular mediate product that they're then distributing. And this is part of the mediatization of stadiums, of course, because like broadcasting trucks can just like pull right up into the stadium and hook up their broadcast feeds right to the stadium. So they're, they're sort of, you know, infrastructure that also connects to other media infrastructures like the broadcasting station. But then stadiums are also mediating. And when I'm thinking about this, the way in which they act, they literally stand between as kind of symbols of as brands of a city, a place, a team, but also they mediate place more material, more materially also, because they are these huge structures. So they're often kind of buffers between places, or they distribute people between places. And there's these sort of material infrastructures then that sort of connect and disconnect parts of the city and orchestrate the movement of bodies and capital and other sorts of resources. Yeah. And now when you were mentioning that the, well, bodies, right, moving as well in your work, you talk also about how stadiums are connected to who we imagine visit them. So like the imagine stadium goer. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how that comes into play? What did you find out in your work about this? Yeah. Well, I think this is where the sort of historical part of my work becomes really significant. And like, I initially sought out just to write about contemporary stadiums. But to me, it's like, I couldn't really understand this movement of the contemporary stadium outside of its histories, especially within a particular city and the work that like these stadiums do for cities over time, right? And these different sort of eras. So in terms of the ideal stadium goer, what I call the first generation of stadiums, which is after in the United States, the actual first generation of stadiums were mostly wooden built, and they all burnt down. So I sort of don't count those. So this is like the, you know, early 1900s, like late 1800s to early 1900s, the stadiums that sort of stuck around like Fenway Park in Boston, for example, these were stadiums that were largely built for working class men. And they were part of sort of larger citizenship training practice to, especially during a time of like a lot of inter immigration coming into the United States, then sort of dissolution of like what it means to be an American. Baseball stadiums in particular became places to sort of train men working class and in some immigrant men on what it meant to be American, where you were allowed to exhibit kind of rowdy behavior that might not be allowed in other sort of like citizenship trading institutions at the time, like a museum, but also like not too rowdy, right? So it was like a contained working class masculinity that turned maybe like ethnic rivalries into sporting rivalries, right? And so that you could all sort of like cheer for your own team, but you then sort of disarticulated yourself from those like ethnic nationalisms and we articulated to like a larger American nationalism and regionalism around the sporting rivalries. The second generation really took place in the late 1950s, 1960s, and that in the US also coincided with suburbanization, the introduction of television, and a real focus on commute consumer culture. And so many of these stadiums were built to facilitate movement of the suburban white fan who had many of them had like fled the city in what is called white flight with the fear of the city as being a space of sort of like underclass blackness, right, associated with sort of racial otherness. And so many of these stadiums in the second generation were built to as part of urban renewal and to displace those folks that were sort of problematized as like the problems of the of the city. And they were sort of connected to highways in order to facilitate the movement of suburban white fans into the city. Some stadiums during this time are also built in the suburbs as well. So that's a kind of part of it. But during this era, in the second generation, the sort of idealized man was turned from the working class man into more of the middle class family. So it became more of a place for like family fun. Now, in the third generation, which I mark at the beginning of Camden Yards at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, which was a stadium that was built as part of a revitalization project in Baltimore, but also sort of harkened back to those early first generation stadiums and ball parks of trying to be sort of nostalgic. It's kind of called like a retro modern shift. These stadiums coincide more with an idealized sort of like luxury and global clientele from like the 1990s onward. And so it really aligns with shifts in globalization and transnational capitalism. And where you see these stadiums being built more around trying, there's, there's many more luxury spaces, right? Like luxury box seats and clubs and all sorts of like tiers and zones so that and those zones are all protected by, you know, like datafication that determines like what zone you can go into. So I think that this third generation, although there are still spaces for like middle class families, more idealized the sort of like luxury business clientele. It's really interesting to hear this, this evolution of, of the stadium and who's expected to, to go in them as well. In, when you were talking about this, you, you mentioned at some point for the second generation in particular that the target group or models middle class family, white middle class family. And part of your work indeed talk about how stadiums are as media ties places of sport actually creates new systems of inclusion and exclusion. And you're looking at it in, in the context of the US, as we said, and there you bringing the notion of white space, for instance, in particular to, to American football, as we would call it here in Europe, football, as we should call it here. And baseball stadiums, for instance, could you still help us understand this? I mean, I find that really interesting, especially because a lot of the narratives about sport are about these being places of inclusion. But so I think it's really interesting how in your work, you actually show how they are part of those systems of inclusion and exclusion, and in particular, how they are parts and parcel of whiteness. So if you could talk a little bit more about that and help us understand how they are, yeah, how they are part of that in the US. Yeah, I think there's, there's so much to talk about here. Because as you say, like sport, from the beginning, right, formalized sport was meant to be the sort of like assimilated process, right, that where you like, let go of your, you know, your identity and just form around the sporting rivalry isn't, you know, people who participate in sports, we sort of imagine that it's like a meritocracy and like you're just gonna, if you're, if you're good at your sport, you're gonna be great. But of course, like we know that that's not really true. And that that myth of meritocracy is you like utilize this sport as a way to cover over like deeper antagonisms. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why like sport is, and stadiums are like police so intensely to like prevent protests from erupting is because they play such like a core ideological role in American nationalism and sort of upholding the myth of the American dream, right, that like anybody can come here and make it. And all you have to do is work hard. And so in terms of it being a white space, then I'm really drawing here on George Lipschitz in his book How Racism Takes Place where he talks about the white spatial imaginary. And in this sense, I'm thinking about whiteness as a social construction, right, tied to systems and structures, not individual white people, right, but the way in which this ideal of whiteness comes to construct space in particular as an ideal space for the, the movement of white bodies. So aligning with the sort of social construction of like what we presume whiteness to be. And I'm just going to quote a little bit here from Lipschitz because I think this is a really helpful for sort of elucidating why sports in particular and sports stadiums are so clearly like produced by the white spatial imaginary. So Lipschitz says that the white spatial imaginary idealizes pure and homogeneous spaces, controlled environments and predictable patterns of design and behavior. It seeks to hide social problems rather than solve them and promises the quest for individual escape rather than encouraging democratic deliberations about the social problems and contradictory social relations that affect us all. So when I read that quote in Lipschitz's book, I was like, Oh my God, this is the stadium, right? It is this sort of pure and homogeneous space, right, where it's rarely tried to be like purified by removing and securing this, removing any threats, right, as an incredibly controlled environment, largely through practices of surveillance and datafication. And it tries to create sort of predictable designs and behaviors, right, whether that's on the playing field or in the stands, right, so that no, any threats can be removed. And then sport just more generally tries to hide social problems rather than really solve them, right, and that sort of ideological myth of the meritocracy and the American dream, providing this sort of space of escape rather than real sort of democratic deliberation. And when, when players like Colin Kaepernick, who was the 49ers, a quarterback started kneeling in objection to police brutality in the stadium and on the field, right, he was on the one hand outside of the stadium, he got a lot of support, right, from activists and even politicians, right, everyday people on social media. But in the stadium, much more booze, right, and then he got thrown off the team, he remains unhired to this day, right. And so there's very like protests in the stadiums are sort of immediately seen to be like a problem to be removed, right, which I think really sort of demonstrates in what the ways in which they are pretty like conservative reactionary spaces. And so in my view, stadiums are produced within this sort of white spatial imaginary, and then they help to produce the kinds of bodies that identify with that white spatial imaginary. So you're especially encouraged to identify with those like the with surveillance, right, as a practice of not only a practice of like risk mitigation and safety, but as fun, right, with things like the kiss cam, right, or now they have this fan cam where you can like, because the the CCTV systems hooked up in the stadium hook up with this platform called crowd IQ, that identify can it has like really high megapixels, so it can like identify the lettering on a fan's t-shirt, and then you can, you know, create an account with them, and find yourself in the crowd and like a picture, right, that you can then circulate on social media. So it's sort of like pitches surveillance as fun, and encourages you to sort of like submit to this, this digitization and datafication of the stadium to like give over your data out of fun. And then the other pieces of the stadium that I think are sort of part of the production of whiteness are also the ways in which stadiums are part of these urban regeneration or urban renewal practices. And so I talked a bit about this in terms of the second generation of stadiums, but in the third generation, more contemporary stadiums, they shift from this sort of discourse of urban renewal to revitalization. So whereas the second generation was sort of more like overtly racist in the terms of like wanting to engage in slum clearance and really like overtly problematizing, especially black and poor bodies in urban US urban cities, the contemporary stadium uses more of a sort of post-racial ideology and a discourse of what Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls colorblind racism, or what Henry Jiru might refer to as neoliberal racism, where urban blackness is kind of seen as an asset to make or make plays seem hip and cool. But at the same time, it's sort of carefully constructed as just a sort of item of consumption rather than tied to a history of political struggle. And so these stadiums participate in revitalization in ways that seem to be investing in these neighborhoods, but in ways that often have sort of negative effects on people who can't necessarily, people or like cultures that aren't necessarily like culturally expedient, right? Whose cultures aren't able to be marketed as like products to white fans visiting the stadium, for example. Yeah, thank you so much for unpacking all of this for us, because indeed we really, it was really clear all that you said. And from there, I think we got really clearly all the things that come into play in stadiums and that definitely show how stadiums are just one element of society where we see the same, of course, systems of inclusion and exclusion and some discourses, for instance, about racism as well. And you also mentioned coloniality, but we also see like capitalism and neoliberalism. So they are, of course, part of this. And we really get how interesting it must be to actually dive into this in terms of both space and media and how those co-construct a stadium as that particular place as well. Thanks so much for for opening that up for us. You've mentioned several authors already during our conversation, but I wonder if there is one or two names you would want to highlight of maybe people who have particularly influenced your own work and that you would want to, yeah, highlight so that others who are also interested in this topic would maybe read about. Yeah, the one name that I didn't mention that I think is really significant is John Bale, who is a geographer who really started the interest of geographic research on sport. His book, Landscapes of Modern Sport, especially, was really influential, where he really just sort of similar to the ways in which people do and work on media sports show that like media and sport are inextricably intertwined. Bale is really showing that sport and space can't be divided either, that those two things are necessarily connected. So his work was really influential. George Lipschitz, of course, I mentioned about how racism takes place in his book, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, also really, really influential for me. And yeah, I think that those two would probably be the biggest pieces. I could probably mention like a million other folks, but I think those would be the two that I would say, yeah, you've got to read them. Yes, well, that's a good start. And I mean, in the podcast, you already didn't mention several other names, so I could also pick them up and put them on the website. So those who are listening, if they want to have a look at those other authors you've mentioned, could find them. We are getting to the end of today's episode Helen, and I always finish with a more personal and playful question, but also a difficult one. So it's your turn today. Would you tell us what is your favorite city and what makes it your favorite city? Yeah, this is definitely the hardest question. Okay, so I first have to start by saying that I really like to study cities, but I don't necessarily love to live in cities. I like to visit them. So I'm a rural person. I live on a dirt road in Vermont with more cows than people. But there are many cities that I love and hold near and dear to my heart, including the cities that I write about in my book, which are Atlanta, Seattle, and Minneapolis. I also lived in Pittsburgh, which I love Pittsburgh as well. It holds a special place in my heart. But in terms of all of the cities that I visited that I would say, my favorite city, unless it's contested, but I might say Ljubljana in Slovenia. And partly it's because it has such a great name. Who doesn't love to say the name Ljubljana? But really, because to me, it's like a fairy tale city. It's just so unbelievably beautiful and like nature and the mountains are so important to me and just like the views of the mountains from that city and the river and that, you know, crystal clear blue water and the boats going down and then how you can just, you know, have your little coffee or cocktail at a cafe right along the river, whether it's winter or summer. And it's just, I think, a really vibrant city with a super interesting history, all the little places that could be termed like Hugo Nostalgia places with Nostalgia for the former Yugoslavia. I think are really fascinating in the sort of architecture. There's also like Bay Hostel that is an old prison that's part of this whole almost like autonomous zone in the city that I think has really sort of like interesting politics happening there. So yeah, I think it's a really fascinating and city rich with culture and history, politics, so all the elements of a great city. Yes. And I think for those who didn't go, I mean, you gave a really great user. I think they will want to go after they've listened to your answer. Although I might be like, but don't go, you know, don't make it into a huge tourist destination. But I guess it already kind of is. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Helen. Thank you. Thank you all for listening. you