Speaker
Description
Organized sport is an extremely popular hobby for children worldwide and is expected to offer joy, play and building of social relations for its participants. However, youth sport is also a space which has been shown to produce multiple formations of exclusion, bullying and violence in different contexts (Spaaij et al 2014; Long et al 2017; Hakanen et al 2019).
Much research on these joys and pains of youth sport has had tendencies to focus on simple categorical factors with quantifying gaze and to reduce the interpretation of the phenomena into a unit of individualized human based on theories looking for causalities and explanatory models. However, this kind of research is often unable to explore the complexity of the intensive emotional and affective aspects of sport practices which both enable the joyful, communal embodied movement as well as close off these possibilities with restricting and harming patterns of social-material relations.
In the presentation, I argue for the importance of sport sociology to engage with theories that intend to sustain the complexity of the phenomena they are studying. By using examples from my empirical ethnographic study on youth sport in Finland, I present possibilities that sport sociology has for reminding us of the material, affective and relational, in other words messy, nature of the world. I argue that in interdisciplinary research, this perspective on complexity is crucial if we aim at finding novel ways to know which is only possible by staying with the trouble.
