Short Abstract

Using sporting mobilities as an African prism, this panel examines how aspirations for movement and social becoming intersect with unequal labour markets, immobility, racialised and gendered exclusion, and questions of belonging.

Long Abstract

Sporting mobility is often narrated as a linear story: the selective movement of a few privileged professional athletes towards success and social mobility overseas. Viewed through “African Prisms”, however, such apparent linearity refracts into multiple and intersecting trajectories. Against a backdrop of devalued educational promises and constrained economic opportunities in many African contexts, aspirations for sporting mobility have become an important horizon of future-making among young people.

Yet these aspirations encounter uneven opportunities and precarious realities shaped by involuntary immobility, unequal labour markets, economic hardship, racialised and gendered exclusion, and uncertain career and life trajectories. Centring athletes’ experiences and navigations while also attending to the institutions, intermediaries and structures that shape them, this panel uses sporting mobilities as a prism through which broader questions of aspiration, inequality, exclusion and belonging can be examined.

Rather than treating sport as an isolated field, the panel connects sport migration to wider debates in African studies on (im)mobilities, future-making, labour and social becoming. We invite contributors exploring how sporting mobilities are imagined, facilitated, negotiated, experienced, constrained or contested across African and transnational contexts, and what these processes reveal about broader societal dynamics, including migration aspirations, recruitment and intermediaries, precarious sporting labour, involuntary immobility, ‘race’ and racism, gender and sexuality, integration and belonging, and interrupted or return mobilities.

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