Professor Josef Fahlén
IAS Residential Fellow
Umeå University
Josef Fahlén, PhD, is Professor at Umeå University, Sweden, and Visiting Professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway. Currently, Professor Fahlén serves on the editorial boards of the European Sport Management Quarterly, the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and the European Journal for Sport and Society.
In his research, Professor Fahlén focuses on the interaction between sport policy and the organization of sport and has led numerous research projects on sport policy making and implementation in the Swedish, Scandinavian, and European contexts. Recently, Professor Fahlén reported the findings from a large comparative research project that has studied the potential of voluntary organized club sport in contributing to the integration of newly arrived migrants.
Currently, Professor Fahlén is involved in a project studying the increasing regulation of sporting practices. The project involves 25 colleagues from 15 countries and will result in a collection of work on how, why, in what shapes and by whom regulations are developed, what problems they are launched to solve, and what consequences that follow from them. During the next couple of years, Professor Fahlén will also be studying issues relating to the politics, governance, and organization of Indigenous sport in the Scandinavian context. Together with colleagues in Finland and Norway, he is setting up a larger comparative project studying the effects of specialized and integrated Sámi sport clubs on issues such as participation, self-determination, integration, and ethnic identity.
During their Residential Fellowship, Professor Fahlén will be collaborating with Professor Paul Downward from the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences.