Call for papers: Sports in Uncertain Times

Special issue on ‘Sports in Uncertain Times’ of the journal Transylvanian Society (Erdélyi Társadalom)

Editors: Dr. Zsombor Csata (Babeș-Bolyai University, email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Dr. László Péter (Babeș-Bolyai University, email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), and Prof. Dr László Marácz (University of Amsterdam, email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Call for Papers

Recent environmental concerns, the Covid pandemic, and the Russian-Ukrainian war have brought about radical changes that alter our perceptions of sports in the economy and society. These unprecedented events have globally challenged the business models of professional sport, once thought to be robust, and have further reinforced the inequalities of access to mass sports. International diplomacy uses the sport as a soft power with a vehemence not seen since the Cold War. Uncertainty and insecurity have become constant in our everyday lives, especially in this part of Europe. It is affecting every aspect of how we relate to sports.

The crises usually force us to rethink our perspectives and practices. At the intersection of the pandemic, war threat, and environmental stress, there are many challenges to address: how to make the mass sport more inclusive, how to end discrimination and how to reduce the wastefulness in the global sports industry, how to lower the diplomatic stakes of international competitions, etc.

In this thematic issue of Transylvanian Society, we accept studies that help us understand these processes and changes and/or formulate scientifically based expectations about the future of the sporting world. Relevant topics of the special issue include, among others:

• changes in the community vs. individual nature of mass sports due to the epidemic and physical distancing
• inequalities in access to mass sports in times of crisis: declining sociability, deepening health inequalities, segregation of vulnerable social groups
• operational solutions for the difficulties in maintaining local sports infrastructure
• the effects of increasing digitalization of sports
• challenges to the sustainability of the global international sports system, the impact of the epidemic on professional sport as an industry
• Inequalities in the distribution of resources and benefits in professional sports, the precarisation of athletes, career drop-out in times of crisis
• sport as soft-power diplomacy in the past and today
• the representation of power asymmetries in the events, rules, and language of international competitive sports

A title, an abstract of 250 words maximally, and 5 keywords should be sent to the editors before September 30, 2022. The editors will invite 7 authors to submit their papers of circa 7000 words before November 30, 2022. After peer-reviewing, the special issue will be published in the first half of 2023. Apart from the innovative papers, the editors plan to publish several book reviews.