Living with Sport

Welcome to INSA's first Research Image Contest.

Celebrating the theme Living with Sport, we present INSA’s first Research Image Contest. Each entry includes an image, a caption and the name of the submitting researcher. You can read the caption or listen to the cool voice-overs the researchers prepared. To hear their voices and soundscapes, just click the icon. If you use a screen reader, image descriptions are available to support access. Some of the images display and captions address sensitive moments such as injury.

Voting closes on Thursday afternoon, 11 June, so do make sure to have your say before then. The winner will receive a £50 voucher provided by Routledge, which may be used towards purchasing a title from the Routledge Critical Studies in Sport Series, edited by this year’s keynote speaker, Aarti Ratna.

We also encourage you to seek out the authors during the conference and chat with them about their inspiring and thought-provoking work.

INSA is committed to exploring multimodal ways of communicating sport anthropological research.

We welcome your feedback on the overall experience, especially on how we can make it more accessible, as we continue to explore multimodal approaches to anthropology.

Contest Support

The Natural Resources Institute has provided organisational, hosting and administrative support for the INSA Research Image Contest.

Competition Funding

Political Ecology and Culture Research Group

The competition is supported through funding from the Political Ecology and Culture Research Group, Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich.

Prize Sponsor

Routledge has kindly provided a £50 book voucher for the winning image, redeemable against titles in the Routledge Critical Studies in Sport Series .

Website design and technical support: Tom Jones, IT Development Officer, Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich.

From afar the image is dominated by a red hue with some white spots seeming the middle of the horizontal photograph. At a closer look one can see that it is a picture of a crowd of people standing close to each other. In the first row visible to the viewer, most people hold their heads down. Sprinkled throughout the crowd, one sees people holding up burning torches that emit smoke into the sky, filling the top half of the picture. In front of the crowd, in the lower corners of the image, one can see the backs of two heads facing the crowd.

Gold Prize Winner

Ruas de Fogo

A corridor of supporters, flares and smoke welcomes a football team bus before a major match, illustrating how aesthetics, identity and politics have become intertwined in contemporary Brazilian supporter culture.

Vinícius Teixeira Pinto, Loughborough University

Close-up of a knee. Under the kneecap, one sees a white plaster with a beige plaster swirled into a stabilising rope. Below the knee, one sees some fingers, and above the knee, a hand with a silver ring. Together, they attach another physio plaster strip on top of the other two plaster strips to support the kneecap. In the blurry background is a massage table with a person lying on it, and one can see the legs of other people standing around the massage table.

Silver Prize Winner

Body work, bodily integrity: living with football

On matchday, the physio room more closely resembled a workshop than a clinic. Physios went to work on knees, ankles, shoulders and spines.

Madeleine Dove, Australian National University

This photograph is no longer available for public viewing

Bronze Prize Winner

Child Boxing: Humanising the Debate

Unlike other contact sports, muay thai allows blows to the head as a primary target. Here, a boy knocks down a Thai boy at the IFMA Youth World Championships in 2024.

Brian Burns, University College London

The portrait photograph depicts a black haired person (woman) from the back, wearing a yellow apron with blue, red and black stripes. At the lower quarter of the image in the front is a table with glasses and a coffee pot. In the background is a hanging kitchen cupboard on the right two thirds and on the left hang three posters. One is a colourful poster depicting people in movement like running. In the middle of that one poster is a black canvas with golden Japanese lettering. The person in the apron holds up a poster and points to another poster displayed on the wall.

Hakone Ekiden

A local shop owner proudly displays her collection of Hakone Ekiden posters, illustrating how a sporting event becomes embedded within national traditions and everyday life.

Kimberley Ekstrand, The University of British Columbia

4, 14, 3, 8, 7, 10, 6, 9, 19 and 1 are the numbers displayed in white on the back of the red shirts of the people forming the horizontal centre of the photograph taken from the sidelines of a football field. In the background, one sees the sky and the yellow and blue stands that are flooded with sunlight. The players running across the field are in the shade.

Out of Many, One Goal

A warm-up session before a friendly match in Belgium. For these young footballers from Kingston Football Academy, every moment on the pitch is an opportunity to be seen and to pursue a future through sport.

Julia Faulhaber, University of Tübingen

Image of a cricket pitch from the top of the viewer tribune. The field is full of people, but not crowded. From the back of the green, centre right of the photograph, people carry a very long banner that circles the main cricket pitch to the front left of the image. The green is also surrounded by stands and billboards of different heights.

The Big Match

At Colombo’s Sinhala Sports Club, thousands gather for the Royal-Thomian, Sri Lanka’s oldest sporting rivalry, where cricket, school identity and reunion culture meet.

Ben Hildred, Durham University

The landscape-format picture is white and grey; one cannot distinguish much between the snow on the ground and the sky on the horizon. Left of the centre is a person wearing a yellow beanie, black rucksack, ski trousers and a blue jacket. They are photographed from behind, treading through the snow with sticks, leaving a trail.

Walking through the Whiteout

In a landscape where horizons dissolve into white, movement becomes a way of feeling space rather than seeing it. Endurance emerges through the body's relationship with uncertainty, environment and motion.

Eilis Lanclus, Loughborough University

This is a scene on a concrete football pitch surrounded by tropical plants. On the pitch a group of people dance. The Indigenous performers dance barefoot and wear traditional red attire. One white looking person wears green trousers, a green and white shirt and hiking boots.

Celebrating Intercultural Connections

A dance performance in the Peruvian Amazon explores how movement, wellbeing and cultural exchange can strengthen partnerships and create new ways of sharing knowledge.

Kika (Henrike) Neuhaus, University of Greenwich

The photograph depicts people getting ready to surf at a beach. At the bottom of the landscape photograph is flat grey sand; in the middle are breaking waves and groups of people standing together on the sand and in shallow water. Some bend over or crouch beside surfboards lying on the ground. Several people wear red or green Santa suits, and one wears a tutu over a wetsuit. Above them is a grey, cloudy sky with the title 'Just Surfing?'.

Just Surfing? Understanding links between water justice and mental health through local and global surf heritage

A Christmas surf gathering on the Dutch coast prompts questions about surfing's Indigenous heritage, contemporary surf culture, and the relationship between water justice, wellbeing and community.

Fred Preston, University of Greenwich