Speakers
Description
Participatory action research (PAR) has been positioned as an effective methodology for engaging publics within leisure and sport research to foster social transformation. Yet, little has been written about the diverse forms of action that publics engage in and how they make sense of these actions.
This paper critically explores the conceptual, methodological, and applied issues in a PAR social action leisure project with young people from refugee backgrounds. It does so by framing social action as a theoretical and practical way of understanding the meanings that young people from refugee backgrounds assign to co-creating sport and leisure programmes, day-to-day social actions, and delivering social action projects framed around local issues within their communities.
This paper draws from a three-year long PAR project which aimed to examine the lived experiences of young people from refugee backgrounds in leisure and sport programming. It explores the instrumental, value, habitual, and emotional aspects of social action through employing digital storytelling, WhatsApp photo challenge, and photo voice interviews with 10 young co-researchers from refugee backgrounds. This paper considers the potentials and challenges of thinking with the critical sociology perspective of social action theory for making a difference to the wellbeing of young people from refugee backgrounds through leisure. The findings are significant in understanding how sport and leisure researchers can engage young people from refugee backgrounds in meaningful and impactful ways to foster wellbeing and enhance capabilities around locally driven issues.
