Negotiating the New Urban Sporting Territory: Policing, Settler Colonialism, and Edmonton’s Ice District

in Sociology of Sport Journal
Jay Scherer * , 1 , Judy Davidson * , 1 , Rylan Kafara * , 1 and Jordan Koch * , 2
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  • 1 University of Alberta
  • 2 McGill University
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2020-0113
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1–9
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The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework of continued settler colonialism. The main catalyst for this development was sport-related gentrification: a new, publicly financed ice hockey arena for the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers, and a surrounding sport and entertainment district. This two-year ethnography explores this territory, in particular the changing interactions between preexisting, less affluent city-center residents and police, private security, crisis workers, and hockey fans. It reveals how residents navigate the physical and spatial changes to a downtown that are not only structured by revanchism, but by what Rai Reece calls “carceral redlining,” or the continuation of White supremacy through regulation, surveillance, displacement, and dispossession.

Scherer, Davidson, and Kafara are with the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Koch is with the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Scherer (jay.scherer@ualberta.ca) is corresponding author.

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