Assessing the sociology of sport: On national and ethnocultural communities in Canada

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a leading Canadian scholar on sport, identities, and community, Christine Dallaire, considers the dynamic role of sport in reproducing national and ethnocultural communities in Canada. A diverse research agenda grew, merging considerations of not only the trajectory of Canada as a nation, but the meshing of immigrant and new national identities and the role of First Nations communities on the sport landscape. Noting the constant interaction and opposition among communities with different self-determination, ethnocultural and national aims, an ongoing challenge in sociological work about the roles of sport resides in reaching nuanced understandings of differing identity narratives that circulate and that are reinvented through sport. Future research will need to focus on the complexities of Canadianness in sporting identities and how the reproduction of contested ethnocultural and national identities are cast and understood in stories about differentiated, racialized, and gendered sport heroes.