Urban Outcasts, Disposable Bodies, and Embodied Research in a Western Canadian “Arriviste” City

Abstract

In this article, we follow the recent calls of “sport and physical cultural studies” scholars to revisit the significance of the embodied research process and, in particular, the lived social body of the qualitative researcher. Between 2011 and 2013, we conducted a critical ethnography of the experiences of less affluent (and often homeless) young men at publicly subsidized weekly floor hockey games in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Our analysis focuses on three vignettes drawn from detailed field notes and ongoing interviews to reveal the researchers’ embodied investments in race, gender, and class politics; our coming to terms with these investments as they intersected, and clashed, with the bodies and agendas of the city’s “urban outcasts”; and, finally, the importance of interpreting these experiences with sensitivity to the context and community within which we, as critical ethnographers, coexist and, through our words and actions, help to (re)create.