Symbolic violence and the Olympic Games: low-income youth, social legacy commitments, and urban exclusion in Olympic host cities

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeless youth
• Bourdieu
• symbolic violence
• Olympic Games
• social exclusion

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the collaboration of Dr. Paul Watt, of Birkbeck College, University of London, in conducting the London fieldwork. She would also like to acknowledge the research assistance that she has received from several individuals over the course of the project: Trevor White, Christine Meyer, Chris Enman, Amelia Curran, Ryan Boyd, Kevin Partridge, Deborah Conners, Jessica Azevedo, Lynette Schick and Valerie Stam. Above all, she is grateful to the youth who participated in this project, sharing their stories and their time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Dr. Paul Watt of Birkbeck College, University of London.

2. All names used in the paper are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) postdoctoral fellowship (2008–2010) and a SSHRCC Standard Research Grant (2009–2013).