Pratik Nyaupane final project

 My final project is a continuation of the ideas discussed during my presentation during the week we read and explored surveillance. Just as a refresher, I touched on the stadium, as a site where surveillance and datafication have significantly influenced. The stadium is a unique space that allows for meaning-making practices of community and belonging for many, yet the same space has also been one of difference, exclusion, control, and hyper-surveillance. My final paper will investigate how the technologization of the world’s game, soccer, or football as it is called around the globe, has allowed for the articulation, promotion, and authorization of violent and invasive surveillance and screening practices at the sports venues and beyond, reconstructing their spatial logic and effectively transforming the spectators’ experience. Stadia as significant sites for performing the nation in multiple ways, serve as an impetus for the state to exercise power and reconfigure dynamics of violence in various forms.  

The narrative that champions the use of technology as the way of sterilizing the stadia from violence, threats, and difference, conceals the displacement that precedes gentrification; the corporate interests in extracting data; the exclusionary and racial logic upon which the police operate, and how both players and fans embody the anxieties and tensions of nationalism and technologization in the global era. Thus, this project questions how the technologization of the stadium reconfigures how the space is socially, materially, and aesthetically constructed. Particularly I want to explore and investigate how the technologization of stadium produces knowledge informed by and that recursively shapes hegemonic logics of race, gender, class, and other demographic identities.

For the scope of this paper, I plan to analyze and investigate the recently built Banc of California Stadium, a soccer-specific stadium near Downtown Los Angeles and the campus of the University of Southern California. I contextualize the technologization of “The Banc” as it is referred to by its frequent patrons but through the framework of globalization, where the stadium is often a microcosm of the community or region it resides in. Globally, technological implementation has started to transform how the space inside and around the stadium is constructed, navigated, and experienced. However, it is also imperative to situate the stadium’s relationship with Los Angeles, valuing the rich historical and cultural understanding of the city and its members who play an important role as the subjects of spectators and the surveilled.

The Banc of California stadium, unlike other technologically advanced stadiums such as SoFi in Inglewood or Crypto.com Arena in Downtown Los Angeles, presents a uniqueness that allows for a rich cultural and localized analysis. The stadium was built specifically for the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) of Major League Soccer (MLS), who in their five short years have already created a community of members that dictate the culture of support. On any given match day, the stadium is occupied by a union of supporter groups who each equally share a passion not only for LAFC, but for their Korean heritage, or with the LGBTQ+ community, the Palestinian liberation movement, or other political and social causes (Barajas, 2022). The entire “North End” of the Banc has space for 3252 individuals and is a safe standing area, designed after the result of several stadium tragedies from overcrowding, stampeding, and crushing fatalities from various parts of the world but mainly the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 (Henderson et al, 2019). Not only is the North End of the Banc, safe standing, but is regarded as a “safe space” where members of marginalized identities are not only present, but openly displaying their identities through flags, chants, and banners. 

In many American sports, there is a strong nationalist and patriotic component to the performance within the stadium, and while that does exist in American soccer, the supporters and players often challenge those hegemonic ideas of American-ness. At a Major League Soccer match, one may likely see flags of other countries (including non-Latin American countries such as Palestine and Catalonia) more than the flag of the United States. With the prevalence of media objects that openly display signages of the Palestinian flag, gay and trans rights, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slogans, and anti-state slogans (Zirin & Boykoff, 2019), I am fascinated by the ways in which security and surveillance technologies are deployed in the stadium to surveil the crowd. Ultimately, I am looking to investigate the stadium through the grounded frameworks that help critique and understand the notion of the datafied stadium and surveillance mechanisms through corporate and state authorities.