Mobilising sociology of sport for social change beyond the pandemic

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, conversations about how to build sport back better are becoming increasingly pronounced. The crisis both deepens inequities and creates opportunity as a new way to configure sport post-pandemic demands to be discovered. The challenge has been thrown down to sociologists to help reimagine and reshape the course of sport. What might such re-enchantment look like? And how might it help realise the sociology of sport’s untapped potential to advance impactful public sociology? This paper explores these questions with a particular focus on sociologists of sport as co-creators of, and actors in, social change. I discuss five issues that I see as being relevant for rethinking and reconfiguring sport beyond the pandemic: (1) reclaiming the ludic and pleasure; (2) rethinking sociality in sport; (3) social inequities and ‘sport for all’; (4) de-/re-centring power in sport for development; and (5) global interdependence and interconnectedness. The insights presented can hopefully make a modest contribution to our collective understanding of transformative practice in and through the sociology of sport in uncertain times.

Considering the youth voice: needs and asset assessment in sport for development using photovoice

With the growth of sport for development (SFD), it is increasingly important to ensure that programmes are intentionally designed to meet the needs of the communities they serve, in a way that helps build community capacity. Still, many programmes have been criticised for not considering the voices of marginalised individuals, specifically youth programme recipients, in the planning and development of SFDprogrammes. Additionally, programmes are developed from a deficit approach where only the needs or negative aspects of the community are being considered in the planning and development of programming. With these issues in mind, the purpose of this study was to assess the usefulness of photovoice as a strategic tool to give youth a voice in SFD needs and asset assessment. Additionally, it examined how practitioners can utilize the outcomes of a needs and asset assessment in planning and implementing SFD programming. The results highlight the assets and challenges that the youth participants identified and the practical use of the assessment from the perspective of programme administrators. The results suggest that photovoice can allow youth programme participants to have a genuine voice in programme development.

Sport for Development and Peace

Sport has been used as a core component of programming and in building inclusive social spaces long before it was finally recognized and mainstreamed as a part of the Millennium Development Goals and later in the Sustainable Development Goals. S Ananthakrishnan describes in detail the progressive incorporation of sports in the UN development agenda and discusses the limits and possibilities for member countries like India. The chapter is designed around the issue of sports as a new engine for social development across the globe and its role in empowering the disadvantaged, and its potential for combatting discrimination, engaging youth and women. Until very recently development studies scholars have neglected the rich possibilities of sports as an entry point and a stimulus for change. However, over the decade it has become a strategy for social intervention among disadvantaged communities. The richer countries of the Global North have to be persuaded to invest in sports and its equitable growth in the developing regions, thus defining a new path of international cooperation.

Public pedagogy and leadership in sports organisations: Futebol dá força for sustainability?

Sport is a key educational and leadership arena for societal change and today’s sustainability challenges. Sports organisations have the potential to provide, initiate and create processes, situations and spaces for learning, socialisation and meaning making that go beyond traditional schooling and lead community change and capacity building towards sustainable development. This article is located in the research fields of public pedagogy and the intersection of leadership and sport for development, and contributes knowledge about how sports organisations’ public pedagogical practices and leadership support community change towards sustainability. The study is confined to soccer and the non-governmental sports organisation Futebol dá força (Football gives strength). The approach of public pedagogical leadership is developed and used to analyse and reflect on the function of sports organisations’ pedagogical leadership in community change and capacity building towards sustainability.

Empowering Girls Through Sport: A Gender Transformative Approach to Life Skills?

From the Pacific Islands to Sub-Saharan Africa, development organizations have positioned sport as an ideal tool for building important life skills that can be transferred from the playing field to day-to-day realities. Sport has also been positioned as a key space for girls’ empowerment, especially in contexts where gender norms limit girls’ mobility and/or their opportunities to engage in activities stereotyped as being for boys. But an approach that solely focuses on empowering girls through sport by depositing in her useful life skills ignores the structural conditions that have disempowered her in the first place. This chapter examines the gender transformative potential of sport-based life skills programs by exploring the skills that are being targeted, especially for girls’ empowerment, by the sport for development (SFD) community. The chapter then examines the implications for our understanding of life skills approaches to gender transformative social change, particularly as it pertains to addressing the conditions that have held girls back.

A Method for Conducting Preliminary Analysis of the Nature and Context of Sport for Development and Peace Projects in Fieldwork Research: An Illustration With a Malagasy Non-Governmental Organization

More research on sport for development and peace (SDP) organizations is needed to better understand their actual contributions to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, the unstable, restricted, or even risky contexts in which many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and SDP agencies sometimes operate often leave researchers to face important challenges to develop effective or feasible methods to work with such organizations. This study aimed to address the ontological and epistemological questions about what should be known about a given context in an organization before setting off on fieldwork. We propose a methodology, based on an actantial model (AM), as a method to analyze the nature and context of a project, to assess the actors involved in the project, and to establish if the global cost (i.e., material, temporal, financial, and physical) for conducting fieldwork is realistic and feasible of all the parties involved in the potential project. To illustrate this process, we analyzed the nature and context of an SDP project in Madagascar as the first step for potential collaborative research. As researchers, we do not want to invest time and energy to build up a fully developed field research project with an NGO in a context where it would not be realistic or feasible to conduct such research. Actually in this context, developing a research protocol without an implementation strategy might not only be detrimental to the researchers, but also to the NGO itself, where resources are often limited. Accordingly, the results from this preliminary field research demonstrate that an AM is a relevant analytical tool for obtaining insights about the context, the actors, and their relationships within an NGO. In conclusion, this model might be a useful instrument for conducting an initial analysis for the preliminary identification of the necessary conditions for the construction of a sustainable empirical research partnership with a given SDP project.

Mind the gaps: On the North/South Nexus in the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ discourse

In this conceptual article, we present the “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) discourse as a case of scientific rationalization. First, we shed light on the ongoing theory debate around the “global/local problematique” in globalization and global policy research in comparative and international education. We then link up with the SDP discourse and show that academic work mostly features research related to the fact that the majority of the SDP programmes and ways of implementing them have been conceptualized in the Global North, yet are to be implemented in the Global South. In that context, we illustrate International Organizations as sites of scientized knowledge production and translation. Scientific rationalization occurs when specialized technical knowledge and management techniques enter the discourse.