Of centres and peripheries

 This week I was invited along to the launch of a new British Library initiative, Sport and Society. The Summer Olympics through the lens of social science. This is a really exciting development, as the site notes, it 'presents the Olympics as a global sporting event that tells us something about the way individuals, groups and institutions operate in society, and the ideas that drive them' and aims to highlight the British Library social science collection. At the  launch there were a number of very interesting presentations, including Andy Miah talking about some of the problems of saving and archiving alternative media representations of the Olympics, and tapping into some of the research he has conducted with Dr Beatriz Garcia, fore more details see his excellent website. All this talk of marginal voices reminded me of a recent conference in Malmo I attended, also tied into issues of margins and marginality, entitled Centres and Peripheries in Sport. This was an excellent conference arguing that areas at the periphery of sport ought to be reconfigured and reconstituted to reflect the importance of areas that have for too long been seen as marginal. Material from the conference will soon be posted on the website above and all the resources noted above have useful material about sport, society and the Olympics that are well worth consulting.