How Youth Sports Programs Quietly Shape Behavior and Reinforce Class Lines
A new study reveals that sports interventions—often promoted as neutral tools for youth development—actually function as sophisticated systems of social control that can reinforce inequality. Researchers analyzing a Swedish youth football program found that sports practices embed hidden power structures and policy agendas, raising questions about how policymakers design and evaluate community programs.
Originaltitel: Exploring sport as relations of power and governmental rationality
<p>This chapter concerns how youth sports can be explored through a Foucauldian perspective on power, with a focus on social class and social exclusion. The aim is to present how such an approach can be conveyed to explore sport activities, how they are utilised as a means of governing, they take shape as effects of power relations, and form the conduct of subjects. To illustrate the approach, we direct attention to Midnight Football, a sports-based intervention promoted in Sweden. We base our exploration on ethnographic field notes from observations, transcribed interviews with stakeholder, coaches and participants, policy material, and media discourse. Discourse analysis and the analysis of governmental rationality can problematise and challenge such taken-for-granted notions of sport. The key point is to describe power and governing as integral parts of everyday practices and seemingly uncontroversial practices of sport. Sport practices are constituted by productive discourses of problematisation, technologies, and objectives, shaping domains and subjects becoming real as effects, constituting policy in practice. Our approach emphasizes that sport is intertwined with broader governing processes. Through these insights, we show how sport is shaped by, and in turn shape, power structures, rather than existing as an apolitical arena.</p>