Inclusion and Exclusion Through Youth Sport

Symeon Dagkas, Kathleen Armour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136976186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

'We can reach far more people through sport than we can through political or educational programmes. In that way, sport is more powerful than politics. We have only just started to use its potential to build up this country. We must continue to do so.' – Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela's statement reflects a widely held view that sport can contribute in unique and far-reaching ways to the delivery of important social outcomes. But is this really the case? Can sport bring people from different backgrounds together, and in so doing act as a force for social transformation and change? In the language of policymakers and practitioners, can sport contribute to social inclusion or could it be argued that sport acts to marginalize and disadvantage some groups in society? In other words could sport reinforce, rather than challenge, social inequality?

Focusing on youth sport as a touchstone sector of sport in society, this book examines the theoretical and empirical bases of arguments for the role of sport in social inclusion agendas. Authors are drawn from around the world and offer critical perspectives on assumptions underpinning the bold claims made about the power of sport. This book represents the most up-to-date and authoritative source of knowledge on inclusion and exclusion in youth sport. As such, it is essential reading for those who want to use sport to 'make a difference' in young people's lives. It is, therefore, recommended for students, researchers, policy makers and practitioners working in sports development, sports coaching, sport studies or physical education.

Part 1

Understanding Exclusion

1 The Will for Inclusion

Bothering the Inclusion/Exclusion Discourses of Sport

Doune Macdonald, Bonnie Pang, Kelly Knez, Alison Nelson and Louise McCuaig

Introduction

The barriers for many people and the impact of our changing lifestyles on Australians’ engagement with our sports and physical activity need to be examined so the system can be opened to all.

(Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, p. 36)

The national PESSYP (Physical Education and Sport Strategy for Young People), has received significant investment. The focus of this work has been further enhanced by the successful London Olympics 2012 bid; and the ongoing concerns over the health of the nation – which is seen as critical and has raised both the recognition of the role of PE and community sport and its importance in terms of access to provision.

(Sport England, 2005; Partnerships for Schools, 2009)

Worldwide, governments extol the virtues of sport for the benefit of the individual and society. Indeed, for many, participation in sport provides pleasure, a sense of achievement, companionship, identity, health outcomes, income etc. but there is more to sport than this. Sport is an embodied cultural practice that is invested with several interrelated biopolitical purposes beyond individual fulfilment, such as health promotion, social cohesion, and nation-building. The discourses of sport, often articulating assumptions about sport’s inherent worthiness, permeate contemporary societies such that it is nearly impossible to sit outside the circulation of these discourses. Schools, families, community organisations, businesses, the media, government policies and associated services are all invested in the idea that the population should participate in sport. Thus, there is an enduring and omnipotent belief that non-participants, those ‘excluded’ from sport engagement for whatever reasons, should become participants such that they are ‘included’. Given this will for inclusion, we suggest that one is never fully excluded from the discourses of sport, although some individuals might be excluded from the practices of sport. This is the first position we take in this chapter.

Our second position, following from the first, is that inclusion and exclusion discourses of sport are not a binary; that is, in practice, children and young people move across a spectrum of engagement that may take them to a point of non-participation from the sporting practice (but not from the discourses). We suggest that this spectrum of engagement involves the circulation of power between the young people and the sporting contexts in which they are included/excluded. Thus, data are presented following two themes: choosing exclusion, where children and young people resist sport participation and being excluded, where children and young people are ‘othered’ in sporting contexts resulting in them becoming non-participants. Regardless of the level of engagement, we conclude that most children and young people in developed countries operate within the discourses of sport though not necessarily through physical engagement.

Those readers who are familiar with the work of Michel Foucault will have noticed reference to his concepts and thinking in the paragraphs above. Foucault’s work provides us with ways of understanding discourse/s, power, inclusion and exclusion practices, and positioning sport as a biopolitical practice, replete with the associated technologies exercised by individuals and governments. In short, Foucault offers a theoretical platform from which to understand imperatives in relation to sport. What follows is a focus on discourse/s and how they may be manifested as biopolitical power. While discourse/s are historically and culturally specific, we have made an assumption (backed by international research) that there are also global similarities in the discourses of sport.

Discourse/s and Biopolitical Power

Discourse was a concept that Foucault revisited over the course of his writing and its meanings and interpretations have shifted over time. In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault wrote that discourse comprises ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972, p. 49). Around the same time, Foucault (1971) explained that in societies the production of discourse is controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by procedures that aim to provoke a sense of power, direction and danger.

According to Carrabine (2001, p. 275), discourses may be understood as ‘functioning as sets of socially and historically constructed rules designating “what is” and “what is not.” ’ Discourses then provide possibilities for what can be thought, giving a ‘solidarity and normality which is difficult to think outside of’ (Mills, 1997, p. 17). As such, discourses are frequently repeated and take on a naturalness, or even a truth, that perpetuates their credibility (Ball, 2007). As sets of sanctioned statements which have institutionalised force, discourses such as those that shape how we think about sport have a profound influence on the way that individuals think and act (Mills, 2004). Take, for example, a policy position ‘Sport For All’. Here, the inherent ‘goodness’ of inclusion in sport is unquestioned and an oppositional stance unthinkable. Sporting practices that accurately conform to the rules of (sport/exclusion) discourse are likely to be ratified.

Discourses also generate subject positions; they generate how people see themselves and the way people go about their lives (Jose, 1998). Consistent with the ways in which Foucault came to see power operating, subject positions or subjectivities shift as individuals engage with multiple and shifting discourses. Such discourses can be associated with, for example, sport participant, student, or family member as they are framed by gender, race, religion, socio-economic status etc. It follows that children and young people are not stable entities and have the potential to assume subject positions that are not predictable, consistent or concurrent with the expectations of the group to which they belong (e.g. where boys may not have an interest in sport). This approach to the self as shifting, unstable, contradictory etc. is pertinent to our discussion as it introduces the notion that while children and young people may be immersed in the discourses of sport, they can also resist them in unexpected ways that challenge the in/exclusion binary.

In his work, Foucault was interested in who or what sat outside the dominant discourse through procedures such as acts of exclusion (e.g. sexuality) and classification (e.g. ability). Paradoxically, exclusion is ‘one of the most important ways in which discourse is produced’ (Mills, 2004, p. 60). In examining the mechanisms of exclusion, Foucault (1972–73) argued in The Punitive Society, that exclusion was not a definitive position one was put into or took up but a continua of aims, relationships and operations of power. Yet, exclusion discourses in/through/from sport generate subject positions such as the non-participating, ‘problem’ individual and group. Following Foucault, we argue that exclusion discourses need to take account of the shifting positions of children and young people; that they as individuals or members of a (problem) group may move fluidly across the sporting landscape and so sedimented readings of their position should be avoided.

The potential for individuals to move across subject positions and perhaps resist dominant discourses such as those associated with the imperatives to be a sport participant can be further explained using Foucault’s understanding of power.

There are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.

(Foucault, 1980, p. 93)

In Discipline and Punish (1979) and the History of Sexuality (1984), Foucault sought to understand power as something beyond the power of the state, describing it, says Paras (2006, p. 64), as ‘an enigmatic entity that was visible and invisible, present and hidden, but most importantly “invested everywhere”’. For humans, power simultaneously produces forms of behaviour, including resistance (e.g. choosing not to participate in sport), as well as restricting behaviour (e.g. boysonly teams) (see Mills, 2004). In particular, Foucault sought to explain power in the context of the new government rationality, liberalism. Liberalism can be considered as the art of government in managing populations, individuals and ‘the question of truth’ (i.e. the production and control of objective knowledge about, for example, healthy weight or sport participation patterns) (Paras, 2006, p. 93).

In the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault (1978–79) analysed the governance of others and oneself; a form of power he termed ‘biopower’ that was ‘situated and exercised at the level of life’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006, p. 196). Foucault saw biopower as having two poles: the individual body and the species body ‘around which the organisation of life was deployed’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 139). The emergence of biopower was marked by the ‘explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 140). Theoretically, Foucault employed biopolitics as a process for understanding ‘the formation of subjects, both as individual consciousness and as members of a given social and political community’ (Jose, 1998, p. 3). In the context of this discussion on sport, the concepts of biopower and biopolitics alert us to ask questions such as, ‘What advantages does the government see from sports participation by individuals and society?’ or ‘How are we persuaded to become sport participants?’

The disciplinary power required to govern both individuals and populations is more successful when it conforms to the ‘natural’ order of things (and a good example here are the discourses of ‘sport for all’). It also follows that ‘The individual, no longer seen as the pure product of mechanisms of domination, appears as the complex result of an interaction between outside coercion and techniques of self’ (Paras, 2006, pp. 94–95) given the interrelationship between the individual and the population to which they belong. However, Harwood (2009, p. 19) emphasises that ‘while disciplinary power can be characterized as making “docile bodies,” these are not bodies at the total mercy of a sovereign form of power’. Markula and Pringle (2006) have examined sport as a disciplinary power looking at its intersection with practices such as exercise, fitness, self-stylisation, and selfcare, to which we could add citizenship, health, sociability, workforce participation, performance and the like. Sport is thus fulfilling the biopolitical endeavour begun ‘in the eighteenth century to rationalise problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constructed as a population’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 73). Through various techniques (including our field’s research on exclusion in/from/through sport), the government seeks to render the population knowable, to understand population patterns of behaviours, and thereby find direction for interventions.

Dominant Discourses on Exclusion in/from/Through Sport

Within academia, there has been a growing body of research into inclusion/ exclusion in/from sport and this knowledge, with its authoritative status, is powerful within the in/exclusion discourses. A cursory review of the literature that follows suggests that the body of research generally takes the line that some children and young people are excluded from sport on the basis of largely structural factors such as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, social class, or (dis)ability. This body of work functions as an underpinning structure of sport discourses (and thereby ‘truths’) and is implicated in how exclusion is talked about and understood. Further, as articulated by Foucault (1978–79, p. 18), academic research as a regime of truth ‘constitutes these practices as a set bound together by intelligible connection and, on the other hand, legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false’. To extend this position, the type of research outlined below, accompanied by large scale, statistical data sets often collected by governments, is integral to the biopolitical strategies for legislation, policy-making, and intervention at the societal level and more subtle steering of the practices of the self by the individual (see Rabinow and Rose, 2006).

Exclusion discourses framed by questions relating to gender (see Chapter 5 this volume) and, more recently, sexuality serve to remind us of the centrality of the body and, more particularly, biological sex for understanding exclusion in/from/ through sport. For example, Clark and Paechter (2007) conducted a study with 10-to 11-year-old students at two state primary schools in London, focusing on the involvement of boys and girls in playground football. The study revealed that boys possessing particular knowledge and expertise in the sport excluded both nonfootballing boys and girls. This hegemonic masculinity has been and continues to be identified in a range of research suggesting that the practices of sport are entrenched with a particular masculinist culture that discourages participation by young men and women who do not conform to appropriate heterosexual norms (Hemphill and Symons, 2009; Wellard, 2006; see also Chapter 7 this volume). The high value attributed to the embodiment of particular sporting skills and dispositions has also generated exclusion discourses concerning dis/ability. A survey conducted in England (Finch et al., 2001) found that young people who have disabilities were less likely to participate in out-of-school sporting activities. Moreover, Bailey’s (2005) review suggested that the barriers that young people with disability encountered in relation to sports included self-consciousness, low levels of self-confidence, and negative school experiences.

Discourses of race, ethnicity and exclusion in/from/through sport are increasing within the sport exclusion li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Understanding exclusion
• PART II Moving towards inclusion
• Index