Search results

AbstractKenyan long‐distance runners have for decades famously dominated international athletic competitions. Most of the aspiring runners live and train in the highlands of northwest Kenya, in Elgeyo Marakwet County, where they have access to competitive peer groups of budding athletes and an elaborate infrastructure of camps, coaches, and managers. The most promising and successful ones travel abroad to take part in international races, only to quickly return and continue training in the 'county of champions'. Meanwhile, Kenya is undergoing a rapid transformation, envisioned by the government's development plan, which promises to transform it into a 'globally competitive and prosperous country'. On the surface, competition is a self‐explanatory notion that drives the transnational sports industry and the state's development plan. However, ethnography of the county's capital, Iten, and its community of athletes reveals tensions: Kenyans take up, negotiate, appropriate, and challenge meanings of competition offered by the state and the sports industry on ecological, gendered, and moral grounds. Ethnography of ideologies of competition in Iten, conceptualized as moral, aesthetic, and gendered projects, complicates accounts of competition as a tool for global neoliberal governance. It also provides an alternative to analyses of African subjects' agency in global circulation of capital, people, and ideas, namely analyses subsumed under signs of marginality, dependence, and subjection.

AbstractIn the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes' bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer available to the new generations of men. For them, the possibility of employment in the sport industries in the Global North has had a transformative effect, despite the extremely limited probability of success. During the same period of time, the world of sport has become commoditized, mediatized, and corporatized, transformations that have been spearheaded by the growing importance of privatized media interests. Professional athletes have become neoliberal subjects responsible for their own destiny in an increasingly demanding and unpredictable labor market. In Cameroon, Fiji, and Senegal, athletic hopefuls prospectively embody this new gendered subjectivity by mobilizing locally available instruments that most closely resemble neoliberal subjectivity, such as Pentecostalism and maraboutism. Through the conduit of sport, the masculine self has been transformed into a neoliberal subject in locations where this is least expected. What emerges is a new approach to masculinity that eschews explanations based on the simple recognition of diverse and hierarchically organized masculinities, and instead recognizes masculinity in its different manifestations as embedded, scalar, relational, and temporally situated.

Contemporary forms of precarity, migration, connectivity, and sociality have transformed what it means to be a man in many African communities. Responding with agency and creativity to various incentives and constraints, Africans have adapted practices pertaining to labour, marriage, and sexuality to the exigencies of modern life amid the impacts of European colonialism, rapid urban growth, economic hardship, and political conflict. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research to study settings in East, West, and Southern Africa, the articles in this special issue review the social changes that have taken place regarding men's roles and assess prospects for the emergence of counter-hegemonic masculinities.

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.