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- FoDiRa-Project: Racism in sports – Extending our understanding of the stacking phenomenon
This project, based at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Research on Integration and Migration (Humboldt University Berlin) and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (Osnabrück University), analyzes the role of racist attributions and discrimination in access to sports, playing positions and leadership functions in sports organizations. The project focuses on a topic that is controversially discussed in the media and society at large, but on which little systematic research has been conducted in Germany.
A first project module deals with stereotypes and with racist stacking (i.e. the unbalanced positioning of players in team sports) in different sports. A special focus is placed on intersectional perspectives on stacking, knowledge productions about stacking as well as further empirical findings about stacking in elite sports in Germany. A second module will analyze how diverse or non-diverse coaching staff are in elite sports. Furthermore, image analysis will be used to reconstruct how athletes are portrayed in the media. Module 3 experimentally examines the extent to which racist attributions can be identified as determinants of racist stacking.
Research questions
- Which stereotypes are associated with sports and how accessible are different individual and team sports?
- How diverse are the coaching staff in the national leagues of different sports?
- Do team lineups change due to racist attributions and do players affected by racism have to perform better to make it into the team lineup?
These questions will be discussed in three modules

Contact
Prof. Dr. Tina Nobis
Head of the Department of Sport Sociology, Institute of Sport Science, University of Wuppertal nobis(at)uni-wuppertal.de
Picture credits: Friederike von Heyden/Bergische Universität Wuppertal