The Poetry of Sport and the Sport of Poetry: Reclaiming Enjoyment and Belonging in an Age of iGaming

Project Leads

Fiona Nicoll

Team Members

Telisa Courtney, Brandon Wint

Cluster: The Role of Advanced Digital Technologies in Shaping Citizenship and Belonging

This project will utilize slam poetry workshops to generate new knowledge on the impact of iGaming on immigrants and foster creative engagement with the enjoyment and belonging afforded by sports fandom and participation, including a poetry-based website/app to counter "addiction by design" (Schull 2014).

The project aims to promote the enjoyment and experience of sports and slam poetry competitions as spaces and practices of belonging to cultural, local, provincial and national communities. Workshops by award-winning slam poet Brandon Wint will facilitate young sports fans to access and refine their own voices and to craft expressive communication in contexts where gambling dominates sports and entertainment media and ‘sticky’ algorithms deliver various kinds of iGaming promotions to immigrant players and fans.

This project uses the arts-based methodology of slam poetry to re/engage young gamblers who are first or second-generation migrants to Canada with the sense of belonging and enjoyment afforded by sports participation and fandom.  While arts-based methods (including slam poetry) have been used successfully in other research focused on youth and migration in Canada and elsewhere, this is the first project to specifically address the emergence of iGaming, which delivers gambling directly to users’ digital devices and is embedded in apps used for social networking, videogaming, cryptocurrencies and financial trading.

The project is currently in the planning stage.

Migration, slam poetry, iGaming, sports, belonging