Pleasure, Play and Everyday Politics in Transnational Action Sport Destinations

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growing recognition that research on transnational migration and mobilities needs to encompass both the ‘large scale movement of people, objects, capital, and information across the world’, and ‘the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life’ (cited in Burns & Novelli, 2008, p. xxi). According to Levitt & Glick Schiller (2004), our analytical lens must ‘broaden and deepen’ because migrants are ‘often embedded in multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, encompassing those who move and those who stay behind’ (p. 1003; emphasis added). Put simply, calls are being made for the ‘geographical “grounding” of transnational discourse’ (Crang et al., 2003, p. 440; Gieryn, 2000; Jackson et al., 2004). Scholars interested in understanding transnational flows, networks and connections ‘from below’ (Mahler, 1998), are increasingly exploring the interactions of ‘people from various backgrounds’ within ‘complex, multi-dimensional and multiply inhabited’ transnational social spaces and places (Jackson et al., 2004, p. 3). Thus, acknowledging the importance of place in transnational flows and networks, this chapter ‘grounds’ my previous analysis of action sport corporeal mobilities within the physical geographies of transnational action sport destinations. In so doing, I reveal some of complex relationships and networks of power within local spaces and places, as well as some of the wider cultural connections in the global action sports field.