Sport, Emotions, and Social Life: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Contemporary Sporting Cultures

Sport, Emotions, and Social Life: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Contemporary Sporting Cultures

Sport is one of the most emotionally charged domains of contemporary social life. From the excitement of competition and collective celebrations of victory to experiences of shame, fear, disappointment, belonging, and resilience, emotions are deeply embedded in sporting practices, institutions, and cultures. At the same time, emotions are not merely individual experiences; they are socially produced, regulated, performed, and contested within broader relations of power, identity, and inequality.

This joint session brings together scholars working at the intersection of the sociology of sport and the sociology of emotions to examine how affective processes shape sporting participation, spectatorship, governance, and representation. We invite contributions that explore the emotional dimensions of sport across different contexts, including professional and amateur sport, physical activity, fitness cultures, digital sport communities, mega-events, and everyday embodied practices.

Particular attention will be given to the ways emotions intersect with gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationalism, disability, age, and sexuality, as well as to the emotional consequences of commercialization, digitalization, performance pressures, and social change. The session also welcomes theoretical and methodological reflections on studying emotions in sport.

By fostering dialogue between the sociology of sport and the sociology of emotions, this joint session seeks to advance understanding of how emotional processes both shape and are shaped by contemporary sporting cultures and social structures.