Title dissertation:
"Like, you would like to just play" – Everyday affectivity and materiality of organised youth sport
Topic trial lecture:
Based on the dissertation's theoretical and empirical findings, discuss how poststructuralist theory can influence research on youth sport
Time for trial lecture: 12:00 – 13:00
Time for public defence: 13:30 – 16:30
Place: Bodø, A13 Elias Blix and Nord.no
Chair of defence: Vice Dean Janne Paulsen Breimo
Assessment committee:
- Professor Pirkko Markula-Denison, University of Alberta
- Professor Marcel Reinold, UiT, The Arctic University of Norway
- Associate Professor Esben S. B. Olesen, Nord University
Supervisors:
- Main supervisor: Professor Gry C. Brandser Nord University
- Internal co-supervisor: Professor Anne Tjønndal, Nord University
- External co-supervisor: Docent Elina Paju, Helsinki University
The thesis is available for viewing by contacting Anneli Watterud, anneli.m.watterud@nord.no.
About the thesis:
This doctoral thesis focuses on the everyday affectivity and materiality of organized youth sport in Finland. It argues that there are multiple processes at play which both restrict and release body’s capacities to connect. To study these processes, the thesis asks how connections and relationships are produced in youth sport and how they contribute to creating new valuations that go beyond the pre-known benefits often assigned to youth sport participation.
The study is based on the immanent ontological perspective, which considers the world as continuously becoming. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offers the main theoretical and conceptual apparatus for the study, connected with newmaterialist discussions on affectivity and materiality. The methodology of the study is an ethnographic approach. The empirical material generated in the fieldwork with a girls’ football team for 8-10-year-old children in Finland includes observation notes, interviews, a video recording, photographs taken by the players and a scrapbook.
The analysis scrutinizes the different everyday events that matter for the football girls. It follows the role of friends in the hobby, desire to play, the team’s habitual practices, joy of movement, getting hurt, the role of adults and other mundane micro-movements that connect and affect bodies on the football ground. With the concepts of territory and deterritorialization, affect, desire, and desiring-machine from Deleuze and Guattari and a conceptualization of play as infinite movement, the study connects these events to the analysis of sport arrangement and its openness to life. The thesis suggests that a more generous analysis of play and movement, beyond the normative goals of youth sport, shows the importance of understanding excess in the social-material processes and its potentially expanding effects in the most ordinary events of youth sport. This can contribute to creating more joyous sport hobbies for children.
Keywords: youth sport, play, affect, desire, materiality
