This month Dr. Pop is all about sports and politics, about the ways that the love of the game gets mixed up with the love of money and power. Celine examines the “rules of the games” in the upcoming London Olympics, Gary comments on a recent drive for professional football in LA spearheaded by a local power broker, and Andrea turns her eye to the collateral consequences of the 2010 African Cup of Nations. Each story deals with the tension between sports for the sake of enjoyment, and sports for the sake of enhancing market values or securing political futures. They address the ways that athletic competitions have become a key fixture in the contemporary global political economy.

This unique mixture, between the politics of sports and the economic game of politics, comes into play every time a city faces a decision about building a new stadium or a country attempts to host a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup.  At stake in these decisions is the deployment of scarce public dollars and vital urban lands. As the future of these resource get decided, a broad collection of stakeholders must debate:  What kinds of benefits might an expanded sports infrastructure bring to our city?  Who will get to enjoy these benefits and for how long? And because these are tough questions, these debates can set off fierce competitions between opposing groups, competitions which make many championship games seem like little-league. To read more about how these questions are being answered in South Africa, check out this recent NY Times article: “Cost of Stadium Reveals Tensions in South Africa.”

At the heart of these debates is the issue of who has the right to access and to enjoy the city. This often becomes a clash between the use value and the exchange value of urban space, between the ways that city dwellers make the most of city lands and the ways these same lands are controlled by outside investors, as well as commercial and government interests.  The 2008 Beijing Olympics offer a clear example of what happens when the concern with building a new sports infrastructure becomes more important than the human rights of urban dwellers. In addition to the seven gold medals won by swimmer Michael Phelps, the Beijing Olympics also featured the displacement of roughly 1.5. million people from their homes.

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For a general introduction to the theory and practice of restorative justice, check out:
Restorative Justice online.

I sat next to an astrophysicist on the flight to South Africa, one who was on a mission to observe the first stars as they formed. How does one look back millions of years to the moments when stars were first coming into being? Well, apparently you just need a very sophisticated radiotelescope in an area with very little interference. My neighbor in the aisle seat, a scientist and professor at Berkeley, was taking advantage of a much larger project called the Square Kilometer Array. By tuning into certain frequencies, this man and his colleagues would be able to gain key insights not just on how stars form, but on the dawn of the universe itself.

In order to understand this project at all, I had to change the way I understand time and space. Here is the thought exercise I was given on that flight: Think of the universe as a balloon. As more air goes into the balloon, it expands. What we experience as time is the expansion of the balloon, moving everything outwards as it goes. Earlier moments in history, like when stars first formed, are really just points that are further out on the balloon. By looking outwards towards those points scientists can capture information that has taken millions of years to travel back to us. This information can then be analyzed, put into equations, and used to fill out our contemporary understanding of the expanding universe, its origins, and perhaps even its future directions.

The balloon metaphor is an imperfect one, but it’s a start. I like it because it challenges me to think about my travels, and my life, in a totally different way. I am not growing older. Time, at least in the traditional sense, is not passing by me. Rather I am moving outwards, with a first-class seat in an expanding universe. Of course, none of us is on this journey alone. All of existence is in it together, at different phases and stages of becoming. Once I landed in Johannesburg I began to enter a new phase in my own unfolding life, one marked by political education and peer learning, by the fruits of other people’s struggles and by my own bonds with a group of trouble makers who call Chicago home.

I was heading to South Africa as part of a restorative justice delegation from the Windy City. Our group brought with it a diverse history of activism, action, and hustling for change. Some of the delegates were working to transform the disciplinary culture of the public school system, others were community leaders deeply rooted in neighborhood life, several had been working for decades to reform the ways our society responds to domestic violence, and many in the group had dedicated their lives to working with young people to shift power in their communities. All of us were practitioners of conflict resolution methods like peace circles, and all of us shared a basic belief in the power of groups to come together to address difficult issues, to deal with the conflicting forces in our lives.

For 2 weeks we meet with like-minded folks in Capetown and Johannesburg, interacting with an incredible array of people, places and projects. We connected with students, principals, teachers turned into police, preachers turned into organizers, community groups, and a whole host of amazing folks. We were there for the 20th anniversary of the release of political prisoners during apartheid (February, 2nd 1990). We were there as South African cities scrambled to ready themselves for the FIFA World Cup. We were there as much of the world heard about the marital and extra-marital exploits of the current ANC leader. We were there to listen to the Soweto Youth Choir, and to hear Hugh Masekela and Sibongele Khumalo perform together live at the Market Theater. But mostly we were just there, riding the balloon together, taking things one van ride and one conversation at a time. Read More…