| Project Detail |
Examining the politics of mega sports events
The nexus between politics and popular culture often neglects the impact of mediated mega sports events like football championships. This hampers our comprehension of how these events reflect and shape political life, and how they influence public engagement with political narratives through media. With the support of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the EU-funded PopPolMPME project will compare their mediation and public memory in diverse political landscapes and explore the implications of these memories on lasting political legacies. The project focuses on two football championships, UEFA 2020 and the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup, in the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Brexit. Through media analysis and focus groups, it offers fresh insights into the intersection of sports, media and politics.
The growing interest in interplay between politics and popular culture lacks consideration of mediated sports mega-events (SMEs) like football championships. This hinders our understanding of how popular sporting events reflect and impact political life, and how populations engage with and interpret political meanings through media events. This project bridges this gap by investigating the lasting political significance of SMEs through an assessment of their mediation and public memory—both comparatively and retrospectively—in democratic and authoritarian contexts.
The project’s research objectives are to 1) compare the mediation of SMEs across political environments, during and after the events, and vis-à-vis prominent political narratives surrounding them; 2) understand how members of the public remember the events, their mediation, and related political developments; and 3) explore the implications of the public and mediated memory of SMEs for their lasting political legacy, and how popular events reflect and influence people’s engagement with politics.
Specifically, the project will comparatively assess the mediation and public memory of two recent football championships—the pan-European UEFA 2020 and the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup—in the context of two crises affecting politics and public life in Europe: the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Brexit. The two research strands, conducted in the comparative English and Russian national settings, include a) an analysis of media coverage of the tournaments and their legacies by national broadcasters; and b) focus groups with audiences of the SMEs.
This project will develop a novel concept of ‘Mega-event Political Memory Ecology,’ which will have scientific, economic, and societal implications. Marrying approaches from digital memory studies and popular geopolitics, this concept will account for the interrelationship between shifting public and mediated memories of SMEs and public understandings of the political world. |
