Alternative sport and affect: non-representational theory examined

Abstract

This paper is our concerned response to the tendency in critical studies of physical culture and alternative sport to reduce experience to language, discourse, texts or representation. We consider the potential of British social theorist and cultural-geographer Nigel Thrift's ‘non-representational theory’ for shedding new light on the lived, affective and affecting experiences of participants in contemporary sport and physical cultures. In this paper we discuss Thrift's seven tenets of non-representational theory, offering numerous examples from the literature relating to an array of alternative sport cultures. We also introduce the constructs of ‘politics of affect’ and ‘politics of hope’, which combine, amalgamate and extend the seven tenets – and are the essence of Thrift's most recent work. These two politics hold great promise for revealing some of the complexities of the nexus(es) between power, power/knowledge, affect, experience, movement, consumption, representation and new forms of politics, in sport and physical culture, in the early twenty-first century. Here we are particularly interested in the implications of these constructs for understanding the developments of various social justice movements (e.g., health, educational, environmental, anti-violence) that have recently proliferated within alternative sport.