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‘You either go on the gang life, or you go on that football life’: class, race, and place in imaginaries of South London’s sports cages

Crossley, Stephen; Curry, Fraser; Billingham, Luke

‘You either go on the gang life, or you go on that football life’: class, race, and place in imaginaries of South London’s sports cages Thumbnail


Authors

Fraser Curry

Luke Billingham



Abstract

In considering the spatialization of race and the racialization of space, this article explores dominant media representations of sports cages in the UK. To date, media interest in these cages, often found on social housing estates, has revolved around the role they have played in the childhoods of a small number of young, almost exclusively Black, footballers, primarily from London. In the first academic article to engage with these issues, we adopt a critical approach, examining white spatial imaginaries which promulgate the naturalisation of poverty, and which produce and reproduce social pathologies associated with Black communities, and young Black men in particular. The enduring racialised tropes of lone parent families, gang affiliation and violence, and Black footballers being skilful and athletic but ‘difficult’ or ‘lacking’ in tactical acumen are discussed. We highlight examples of commodification, exploitation and glamourisation of these spaces. In addition, the reasons for the centrality of cages in the lives of large numbers of young Black men in London, rarely examined in media representations, are explicated. We end by proposing potential areas of research that are worthy of exploration.

Citation

Crossley, S., Curry, F., & Billingham, L. (online). ‘You either go on the gang life, or you go on that football life’: class, race, and place in imaginaries of South London’s sports cages. Journal of Youth Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2023.2226597

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 12, 2023
Online Publication Date Jun 21, 2023
Deposit Date Jun 30, 2023
Publicly Available Date Jun 30, 2023
Journal Journal of Youth Studies
Print ISSN 1367-6261
Electronic ISSN 1469-9680
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2023.2226597
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1169096

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Published Journal Article (1.6 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.





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