Speakers
Description
Breakdance has gained increasing popularity throughout the Western world in recent decades. As subcultural movements involving physical culture and bodily practices among contemporary youth reach a certain threshold of prevalence, it is no surprise that the IOC strive for the inclusion of such acitivities at the Olympic agenda. Breakdance makes it Olympic debut at the Paris Games in 2024.
We take this as a potential sign of "sportification" of Lifestyle sport. Sportification refers to the emergence of new sporting practices which gradually forms organizations that have the power to define the rules of sport-like recreations (Elias, 1971). More specifically, we would suggest that the term may refer to some of the distinguishing charachteristics of modern sports identified by Guttmann (1978), including the rationalization, bureaucratization and quantification of sporting practices and governing bodies.
Our research question is: How does the sportification of breakdance influence negotiations of the symbolic meaning of breakdance in sport policy documents and among athletes and administrative representatives? Our aim is to analyze this question by digging into relevant documentary sources, as well as to conduct in-depth interviews with athletes and leaders of sporting bodies.
Conceptually, our point of departure is two-fold: First, we assess the 'negotiations' between the established federations (e.g. the IOC) and breakdance in the light of insights from the Cultural Studies tradition. This is to identify dominant, negotiated or oppositional responses from breakdance towards the established governing bodies within sport. Second, we make use of the concepts of boundaries and boundary work, from Michele Lamont, to analyze processes of negotiations within breakdance.
