Mega-events and the minor

Abstract

Mega-events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega-events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega-events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega-events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega-events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega-event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega-event research across a globally diverse range of political-economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega-events.