Place, Ecological Dynamics and Football

ABSTRACT

In this review article, I will use the phenomenology of place and read it alongside ecological dynamics theories (EDT) in sport. I will show the many congruences between these two areas of research and use place to support, supplement and show the phenomenological and ontological foundations of ecological dynamics analysis in sports. I show that the findings and principles used in ecological dynamics can be better understood through the work of Australian place phenomenologist Jeff Malpas. Through this relationship between phenomenological philosophy and ecological dynamics theory, I hope to establish a stronger connection between these two diverging fields of research (phenomenological ontology and sport science). Throughout this article, I demonstrate that an understanding of place can provide a widened and phenomenological basis for the understanding of EDT of sport including affordances, constraints, expertise and learning. Specifically, I use the first-person perspective of the phenomenology of place to illustrate a perspective that ecological dynamics theories do not have access due to the nature of their method. As a result, this article augments both the philosophy of place and ecological dynamics theories of sport by orientating them to different views on the same phenomena. Place benefits by being practically applied to sport sciences whereas ecological dynamics benefits by unveiling a new phenomenological perspective, description and ontological grounding to their object of study.

KEYWORDS:

• Place
• ecological dynamics
• sport
• football
• phenomenology

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for the assistance I have received from the University of Queensland. This article also had important guidance from the excellent reviewers of this journal. I would also like to reserve a special thank you for Andrew Crowden and my wife Kristel for their ongoing support and for the freedom they provided me to complete this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is something that has been appreciated and done before (applying phenomenology to sport, e.g. see Martínková (2015) and Nesti (2011) in a special issue of phenomenology and sport in this journal). The uniqueness of my paper is that I use a specific phenomenology of place and combine it to a unique study of sport; ecological dynamics theory to study football.

2. When I use the term ‘environment’ in this article the reader will note that this comes from EDT literature which does not unconceal, to use phenomenology terminology, the lived experience of place.

3. Silva et al.’s physicalist language here may be noted. Not merely do they use the language of information (somewhat at odds to the more hermeneutic language of phenomenology) but also hold that information is detected by players ‘from patterned energy arrays in the environment’ (2013, 767).