Speaker
Description
Breakdance has gained increasing popularity throughout the Western world in recent decades. As subcultural movements involving physical culture and bodily practices among youth reach a certain threshold of prevalence, it is no surprise that the IOC strive for the inclusion of such activities at the Olympic agenda. Breakdance makes its 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 organisations that have the power to define the rules of sport-like recreations (Elias 1971). We would suggest that the term may refer to some of the distinguishing characteristics of modern sport identified by Guttmann (1978), including the rationalisation, bureaucratisation and quantification of sporting practices and governing bodies. We ask: 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 light-shed 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 twofold. First, we assess the negotiations between the IOC and breakdance in the light of insights from the Cultural Studies tradition. This is to identify dominant, negotiated and/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 Lamont, to analyse processes of negotiations within breakdance.
