Description
The research addresses the key research question: How do communities forced to leave their homes create and maintain their collective identity? The study will explore how sport and particularly football represents the collective memory of those who experience displacement and statelessness. Sport, a powerful social phenomenon, allows diaspora communities to maintain and strengthen their collective identity. Amid the lack of formal institutions that create and maintain collective memories, informal actors such as sport clubs assume a crucial ‘identity’ role.The study focuses on two football clubs, Club Deportivo Palestino and Al Wihdat FC. Palestino, founded in 1920 in Santiago de Chile by Palestinian emigrants, has grown into a symbol of the Palestinian diaspora as well as of national identity. Al Wihdat, the club that emerged out of a refugee camp in Amman to become one of the dominant forces in Jordanian football, represents the Palestinian experience of displacement and of life in refugee camps, but also the pride of manifesting a repressed identity. This research will be among the first to analyse the role of sport among diasporas, and the first to use a novel interdisciplinary approach based on the disciplines of international relations (particularly diaspora studies) and sociology of sport.
