Speaker
Description
Young males report the central role of sport in many areas of their lived experience: wellbeing, identity, belonging and community connection among them. The place of aggression in sport has also received much attention. This paper discusses research with 16-25 year old males from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds in Australia, focusing on how sport has enabled them to learn controlled aggression, and the extent to which sport has fostered an environment for developing knowledge and skills that are transferable into areas of political engagement, social activism and redressing inequities in both the sporting and broader lifeworlds. Exploring potentially paradoxical themes around responsibility, leadership, hard work, respect, fairness, reason and passion, this paper concludes from the research that there are parallel pathways of learning occurring for young males through sport that facilitate the development of controlled aggression and its infusion into political ideation and action.
