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Emotional grounds: stories of football, memories, and emotions

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-03, 13:52 authored by Alan BairnerAlan Bairner
Central to the emotional experience of watching sport is memory – the capacity to recall great achievements, triumphs and defeats. For most sports fans, these memories are collective. However, this essay seeks to shed light on the ways in which sporting spaces – in this case football grounds – are also sites of acts of intimate emotional remembering that can exert a powerful hold over individuals even after (or, in some instances, because) many years have elapsed and a certain distance travelled. The essay briefly discusses the sociological significance of emotion, memory and place before adopting a narrative approach to describe and interrogate the author's own memories of particular moments in time and in sporting space. The stories that are told represent an invocation of emotions that are now indelibly associated with specific football grounds at particular times and also, in some cases, with the people with whom the author experienced these places. The essay seeks to demonstrate that the emotions that can be prompted by memories of football grounds often exceed the immediate excitement created by the event and, at least as importantly, necessarily vary from one spectator to another.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Emotion, Space and Society

Volume

12

Pages

18 - 23 (6)

Citation

BAIRNER, A., 2014. Emotional grounds: stories of football, memories, and emotions. Emotion, Space and Society, 12, pp.18-23.

Publisher

© Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Emotion, Space and Society. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Emotion, Space and Societ Volume 12, August 2014, Pages 18–23, doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2013.11.005

ISSN

1755-4586

Language

  • en