When: Thursdays, 18:00 c.t.
Where: Lecture Hall 21, Kupferbau - as well as live via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/91777553493
Organisation: Center for Gender and Diversity Research, Institute of Sports Science

Sport is a central part of our culture. Major competitions such as the Olympic Games or this year's Men's World Cup, held in Canada, Mexico and the USA, are massive media events and important points of reference for people all over the world. Some people identify strongly, through their active or emotional affiliation, with a club or even a nation – depending on the criteria used for comparison. And for many, the personal enjoyment of exercise or competing with others provides a balance to their working lives as well as physical and social enrichment. Whether it is elite or grassroots sport, active exercise or fan culture: sport is of great importance to us as individuals and as a society.

Although the cultivation of performance and competition is a defining feature of (spectator) sport, it also involves many other tensions that are relevant to society as a whole: between competition and equality of opportunity, between comparability and incomparability, and between the pursuit of performance and participation. In this context, questions of heterogeneity and how to deal with different starting points, physicalities, as well as social and cultural affiliations, are of particular relevance.

In this lecture series, we aim to explore these questions from the perspective of sports science, as well as other social and cultural sciences, and to examine how physical, social, and cultural diversity is addressed in sport through interdisciplinary dialogue.

Programme