Deadline: February 2022
The spread of various forms of physical movement could also be observed in Southeast Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, such as physical exercise, gymnastics and organized sports. The basis for these parallel developments included a new understanding of physicality resulting from the Enlightenment and of the relationship between humans and nature, a growing political awareness, various approaches to sporting activity (from national-mobilizing in the sense of Jahn’s gymnastics movement or the widespread “Sokol” groups among the Slavs up to internationalist-socialist) and a new understanding of leisure time, which in the middle-class milieu was derived from changed working hours and a new concept of consumption. In the 19th century, the middle class created associational structures that enabled leisure and exercise in the great outdoors, for example through the widespread hiking clubs, which mainly researched and mapped mountain landscapes through infrastructural measures, which in turn contributed to creating symbolic boundaries.
Continue reading “CFP: Mobilization through Sport in Southeast Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries”