Speaker
Description
Sport and physical activity are increasingly recognized as potential tools for social change and are now being used to serve various social development purposes. Reflecting the modern context and the types of social problems that define it, new perspectives are flourishing, including sport for psychosocial development (Moreau et al., 2014), sport for peace and development (Gadais et al., 2022), or sport for gender equality and empowerment (De Soysa and Zipp, 2019).
The goal of this conference is to present findings from an intervention-research that examined how a sport and nature-based intervention program for youth could enable a shift in relationship to nature. We thus hypothesize that outdoor sport and physical activity can also be powerful tools for ecosocial development. Rosa’s theory of resonance served as the main framework and was complemented with Wacquant’s (2015) carnal sociology to answer our research question and capture the micro-dynamics of embodied experiences, central to the reorganization of our relationship to the natural world. In line with our methodology (intervention-research), a collaborative approach was used to co-develop the intervention protocol by consulting with multiple social actors, including youth eco-activists, community partners and eco-leaders and the program participants, a key process to frame the program around specific ecosocial development goals.
Findings show that outdoor sport and physical activities, when combined with reflective and ecopedagogical tools, can help foster learnings with/in/from nature and (re)connections with self, others (including Earth-others), nature and community, therefore challenging the dominant colonial discourse on nature as commodity for self-enhancement (Larocque, 2022).
