Football for Inclusion: Examining the Pedagogic Rationalities and the Technologies of Solidarity of a Sports-Based Intervention in Sweden

David Ekholm,Magnus Dahlstedt

doi:10.17645/si.v5i2.839

Abstract

Sports practices have been emphasised in social policy as a means of responding to social problems. In this article we analyse a sports-based social intervention performed in a “socially vulnerable” area in Sweden. We examine the formation of includable citizens in this project, based on interviews with representatives involved in the project. The material is analysed from a governmentality perspective, focusing on how problems and solutions are constructed as being constitutive of each other. The focus of the analysis is on social solidarity and inclusion as contemporary challenges, and how sport, specifically football, is highlighted as a way of creating social solidarity through a pedagogic rationality—football as a means of fostering citizens according to specific ideals of solidarity and inclusion. The formation of solidarity appears not as a mutual process whereby an integrated social collective is created, but rather as a process whereby those affected by exclusion are given the opportunity to individually adapt to a set of Swedish norms, and to linguistic and cultural skills, as a means of reaching the “inside”. Inclusion seems to be possible as long as the “excluded” adapt to the “inside”, which is made possible by the sports-based pedagogy. In conclusion, social problems and social tensions are spatially located in “the Area” of “the City”, whose social policy, of which this sports-based intervention is a part, maintains rather than reforms the social order that creates these very tensions.

Highlights

At the forefront of the ongoing political debate are the challenges created due to an increase in segregation
New strategies to meet the challenges emerging from social policy address a classic question of the theory and practice of the welfare state: how can conflicts be counteracted and social solidarity created? In turn, this question follows on from the pedagogic rationality of such interventions (Philp, 1979), i.e., how the creation of solidarity is based on the notion of inclusion and the fostering of includable citizens
We focus on social solidarity as a contemporary challenge, and how sport, football, is highlighted as a way of creating social solidarity

Summary

Introduction

At the forefront of the ongoing political debate are the challenges created due to an increase in segregation. Inequality, alienation, and exclusion are some of the concepts used to describe the tensions and conflicts arising, and in turn threatening, community and social cohesion. This debate highlights the role of welfare state interventions when it comes to taking action against conflict, tensions, and social problems—the problem of solidarity. One example of the mobilisation of civil society is the mobilisation of sport as an arena to meet a variety of social problems (Ekholm, 2017a). New strategies to meet the challenges emerging from social policy address a classic question of the theory and practice of the welfare state: how can conflicts be counteracted and social solidarity created?

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