On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the... more On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the new Rogers Place Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers. The circular, 45-foot-diameter tile mosaic is the creation of renowned contemporary artist Alex Janvier (Denesųłiné/Saulteaux), whose remarkable career has involved fighting for artistic sovereignty and resisting settler colonialism. This mural has prompted multiple expressions and practices of Indigenous survivance, performances and gestures of state and corporate reconciliation, and exists at the edge of some of the lived realities of exacerbated biopolitical necropolitics in Edmonton. In this article, we explore the intersections of art and professional men’s hockey as they coexist under ongoing settler colonialism at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, how do investments in public art in corporate-civic professional sport partnership...
There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various... more There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various sport-related social movements. However, a more capacious approach to understanding the significance of sport-related social movements, their imaginative actions and collective labor, and their impacts on social change, is one that shifts its focus away from binary categories of “success” and “failure”. In this paper, we explore the formation of the short-lived Edmonton Community Benefits Coalition, which emerged in 2016 to oppose the lack of a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement associated with a new publicly financed National Hockey League arena in Edmonton’s gentrifying city center, an area of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. Drawing from our ethnographic research, we examine how coalition members engaged in the collective labor of building solidarity, including the collaborative development of political strategies, while recognizing that the odds of successfully p...
The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework o... more 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.
This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produce... more This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produced an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor within and through a weekly sport-for-development program in the distinct settler-colonial context of Edmonton, Alberta. For over two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban ‘underclass’, one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three-years of ethnographic field notes and interviews with ten men aged 25–42 years, our analysis revealed how these weekly sporting interludes served as convivial, safe, and consistent events that nurtured the development of long-term meaningful relationships with other participants and social workers, as well as a genuine sense of community. The weekly floor hockey matches were, thus, powerful sites in the broader struggle for what David Snow and Leon Anders...
The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly ... more The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly financed, CAD 613.7 million arena was built in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. The arena and its broader entertainment district were designed to ‘revitalize’ Edmonton’s inner city that was already home to the majority of the city’s homeless population. The spatial transformation of Edmonton’s inner city was an example of what geographer Neil Smith referred to as ‘The New Urban Frontier’. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article explores how the local music community reacted to downtown gentrification through songs by punk bands Latcho Drom, Rebuild/Repair and Audio/Rocketry, along with rapper Cadence Weapon. This article assesses a series of reactions ranging from supportive and promotional to critical and resistive. By showing how musicians engaged in the debate over development, this article creates a template for assessing processes of gentrification, through the relations...
When Nirvana found sudden commercial success with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, the... more When Nirvana found sudden commercial success with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, the music industry’s attention became focused on Seattle for the first time. The city, however, had a rich musical tradition going back decades. This thesis examines the rise and fall of music communities in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest from the 1950s to the 1990s: the jazz mileu in Seattle in the 1950s, the Pacific Northwest garage rock network of the 1960s, and the alternative music community of the 1980s and early 1990s. It looks at the factors involved in the development of these three distinct scenes: timing, innovation, and marketability, showing the opportunities and limitations of regional music milieux. In doing so, it reveals a trend of musicians of each scene departing Seattle for more major industry centres like Los Angeles. What separated the milieu Nirvana participated in from earlier regional communities was the fact musicians stopped leaving Seattle. This thesis shows why it was finally more beneficial for them to stay.
On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the... more On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the new Rogers Place Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers. The circular, 45-foot-diameter tile mosaic is the creation of renowned contemporary artist Alex Janvier (Denesųłiné/Saulteaux), whose remarkable career has involved fighting for artistic sovereignty and resisting settler colonialism. This mural has prompted multiple expressions and practices of Indigenous survivance, performances and gestures of state and corporate reconciliation, and exists at the edge of some of the lived realities of exacerbated biopolitical necropolitics in Edmonton. In this article, we explore the intersections of art and professional men’s hockey as they coexist under ongoing settler colonialism at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, how do investments in public art in corporate-civic professional sport partnership...
There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various... more There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various sport-related social movements. However, a more capacious approach to understanding the significance of sport-related social movements, their imaginative actions and collective labor, and their impacts on social change, is one that shifts its focus away from binary categories of “success” and “failure”. In this paper, we explore the formation of the short-lived Edmonton Community Benefits Coalition, which emerged in 2016 to oppose the lack of a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement associated with a new publicly financed National Hockey League arena in Edmonton’s gentrifying city center, an area of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. Drawing from our ethnographic research, we examine how coalition members engaged in the collective labor of building solidarity, including the collaborative development of political strategies, while recognizing that the odds of successfully p...
The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework o... more 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.
This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produce... more This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produced an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor within and through a weekly sport-for-development program in the distinct settler-colonial context of Edmonton, Alberta. For over two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban ‘underclass’, one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three-years of ethnographic field notes and interviews with ten men aged 25–42 years, our analysis revealed how these weekly sporting interludes served as convivial, safe, and consistent events that nurtured the development of long-term meaningful relationships with other participants and social workers, as well as a genuine sense of community. The weekly floor hockey matches were, thus, powerful sites in the broader struggle for what David Snow and Leon Anders...
The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly ... more The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly financed, CAD 613.7 million arena was built in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. The arena and its broader entertainment district were designed to ‘revitalize’ Edmonton’s inner city that was already home to the majority of the city’s homeless population. The spatial transformation of Edmonton’s inner city was an example of what geographer Neil Smith referred to as ‘The New Urban Frontier’. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article explores how the local music community reacted to downtown gentrification through songs by punk bands Latcho Drom, Rebuild/Repair and Audio/Rocketry, along with rapper Cadence Weapon. This article assesses a series of reactions ranging from supportive and promotional to critical and resistive. By showing how musicians engaged in the debate over development, this article creates a template for assessing processes of gentrification, through the relations...
When Nirvana found sudden commercial success with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, the... more When Nirvana found sudden commercial success with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, the music industry’s attention became focused on Seattle for the first time. The city, however, had a rich musical tradition going back decades. This thesis examines the rise and fall of music communities in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest from the 1950s to the 1990s: the jazz mileu in Seattle in the 1950s, the Pacific Northwest garage rock network of the 1960s, and the alternative music community of the 1980s and early 1990s. It looks at the factors involved in the development of these three distinct scenes: timing, innovation, and marketability, showing the opportunities and limitations of regional music milieux. In doing so, it reveals a trend of musicians of each scene departing Seattle for more major industry centres like Los Angeles. What separated the milieu Nirvana participated in from earlier regional communities was the fact musicians stopped leaving Seattle. This thesis shows why it was finally more beneficial for them to stay.
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