state of precarious labor in other industries, with little attention ever given to the part-time and seasonal workers who are the engine behind most major sporting events. The atypical nature of sport event work and the categorization of those workers has been noted (see McLeod, Holden, Hawzen
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R. Dale Sheptak Jr. and Brian E. Menaker
Jay Scherer, Jordan Koch, and Nicholas L. Holt
As a result of a rapidly changing global political economy, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism, a new form of racialized urban poverty has become concentrated in the inner cities of innumerable North American urban centers. In response to these material conditions, various nonprofit organizations, corporate-sponsored initiatives,and underfunded municipal recreation departments continue to provide a range of sport-for-development programs for the ‘urban outcasts’ of the global economy. While sport scholars have widely critiqued these initiatives, little is known about how people experience these programs against the backdrop of actually existing neoliberalism (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) and the new conditions of urban poverty. As part of a three-year urban ethnography in Edmonton, Alberta, this paper examines how a group of less affluent and often homeless young men experienced and made use of a weekly, publicly funded floor-hockey program. In so doing, we explore how this sport-for-development program existed as a ‘hub’ within a network of social solidarity and as a crucial site for marginalized individuals to negotiate, and, at times, resist conditions of precarious labor in a divided Western Canadian city.
Bryan C. Clift
Peachey, Cohen, Borland, & Lyras, 2013 ; Welty Peachey, Lyras, Borland, & Cohen, 2013 ). A state-sponsored floor hockey program in Edmonton, Canada was demonstrated to link physical cultural activities to issues of mental health ( Holt, Scherer, & Koch, 2013 ) and precarious labor ( Scherer, Koch, & Holt
