PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE will publish a special issue on race and sport in September 2004, guest edited by Dr Humayun Ansari, Director of the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Sport engages the physical and mental abilities of groups and individuals all round the world, whether as fans or participants, as professionals or amateurs. Sporting experiences generate a range of complex meanings that are shaped by factors that include race, gender and social class. To fully understand the significance of sport, we need to examine the connections between sport and issues such as social mobility, community formation, individual achievement, ethnic conflict, nationalism and the drive for racial equality. Indeed, the entire sporting landscape is marked by the imprint of race. Hence, this special issue will be devoted to an exploration of the significance of race in the sporting experiences of men and women in different locales—particularly, the sporting cultures of Europe, North America, South Africa and Oceania—in the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries in diverse historical contexts. Papers might, for instance, address the following kinds of questions:

• What is the role of sport in processes of identity and culture formation?
• Are there historical and cultural patterns in the sport of particular ethnic groups and what is the impact of race/ethnicity on the kinds and amounts of sporting practices and activities in which they engage?
• In what ways have patterns of migration had an impact on sporting experiences?
• Why have different ethnic groups, in terms of influence and power, popularity, participation and gender, been ‘over-represented’ in some sports and ‘under-represented’ in others?
• What impact does the media have on the participation and performance of people from minority ethnic groups?
• Has sport facilitated social mobility and acceptance of minority ethnic groups?
• Has the development of distinct minority ethnic sports organizations represented a positive assertion of cultural identity or a negative response to mainstream racism?
• What is the role of government policy with regard to the sporting activities of particular ethnic groups?

Papers addressing these and related questions should be submitted in hard copy with a disk, or as an e-mail attachment, by March 2004. They should be a maximum of 7,000 words with documentation.