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The naturalization of athletes for the purpose of participating in the Olympics is a noticeable feature of today's superdiverse sporting contexts. Focusing on the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, in this paper, I explore how North American-born male ice hockey players who have become naturalized into South Korea are reproduced in media coverage of Canada and South Korea. Applying insights from critical discourse studies, transnationalism, and critical multiculturalism, I specifically examine how each country re/forms its own imagined community through these transnational sporting migrants and the ways that concepts of immigration, citizenship, whiteness, masculinity, and multiculturalism are linked, fused, and/or conflicted within it. Analysis suggests that in both countries, the hockey migrants have been illuminated as new national symbols enhancing the multicultural national brand of each country, whether as immigrants or emigrants, solidifying in the process the hegemonic position of whiteness as a global phenomenon beyond the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human migration is one of the defining features of a transnational age. Challenging the conventional knowledge that identity and citizenship are connected to one territorial state, both migrant and repositioned subjects create a new understanding of identity, belonging, and citizenship within multiple transnational connectivities. Sport particularly produces a new version of belonging referred to as flexible citizenship, including various kinds of skilled workers crossing national borders. In the process of migration, governments play a crucial and a decisive role by determining permission via specific legislation enactment; South Korea's immigration policy, Special Naturalization, is a notable example. Despite the legally encouraged mobility that favors flexible citizenship by state power, this repositioning is regulated and limited by the intricate socio-political logics of race, class, and national identity. Focusing on the controversial issues of the Kenyan-born marathoner Wilson Loyanae Erupe and his bid for Korean citizenship, this study critically examines the tensions surrounding sport migration, flexible citizenship, race, and nationalism. Drawing on the theoretical ideas of critical race studies, specifically, it queries the conflicting encounters of transnational migration and being a Korean citizen to illuminate the structures of racial domination in Korea often seen as a racially and ethnically homogeneous society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]