FSS-DSOC Seminar: “The Sport Industries in the Neoliberal Age and the Reconfiguration of the Future in the Global South”, by Prof. Niko Besnier

Sports industries have undergone radical transformations since the 1980s, when the neo-liberalism conceived by the inter-war Vienna School became a political reality. Now under the power of private television channels, mainstream sports have sought out new sporting talent in increasingly distant lands, stimulating hopes of economic success and sporting glory among young men in the countries of the Global South, where economies had collapsed and the economic restructuring ordered by major donor had eroded labor markets. But these hopes collide with the much more frequent reality of failure, exploitation, and disappointment. Multi-sited ethnographic work carried out by the GLOBALSPORT research team on football players in Senegal and Cameroon, rugby players in Fiji and Senegalese wrestlers highlight the effects of neoliberal capitalism on bodies and futures in sports and contexts that are very different indeed.

Niko Besnier is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at La Trobe University in Melbourne (Australia) and in the Spring Semester 2025 Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has taught at numerous institutions in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Japan. He is the author of numerous articles and 12 books on globalization, migration, the body, sex and gender, economic relations, and language, and he is currently developing a research programme on the economics and politics of “wellness.” He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Pacific Islands, Japan, and the United States. In 2012–17, he directed a large multi-sited project on the migration of professional athletes. In 2015­–19, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal American Ethnologist.