Informal sports for youth recovery: grassroots strategies in conflict and disaster geographies

ABSTRACT

Researchers across an array of disciplines are focused on measuring the potential of specially designed programs – sport, movement, and/or arts-based – for supporting the recovery of youth in contexts of conflict and disaster. Yet, few such projects engage youth directly to capture their experiences of trauma and recovery, and too many continue to assume youth are ‘victims’ requiring ‘our’ (adult-designed) versions of support. This paper seeks to move scholarship, policy and practice beyond the ‘deficit model’ by providing space for local voices and prioritizing the creative grassroots strategies devised by youth to support their own recovery. Drawing upon three case studies and a multi-method approach (interviews with digital ethnography) it reveals the social and cultural benefits of grassroots informal sporting activities, particularly in providing youth with opportunities for valued forms of physical self-expression and escapism, social connectedness, and possibilities to redefine physical and emotional geographies. In so doing, this paper reveals informal sports as critical resources taken up by youth within situations and systems where their specific needs are too often marginalized. It also highlights the opportunities in alternative methodologies – i.e. longitudinal research, sustained digital observations – for building relationships and amplifying the voices of youth in conflict and post-disaster geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• conflict zones
• informal sport
• recovery
• resilience

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the generous support of a Marsden Fast-Start grant, or the willingness, energy and knowledge of the youth who participated. I am also grateful to the editor and reviewers for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Many other videos are publically available on Youtube that show skateboarders and other informal sport participants reinterpreting disaster damaged geographies, including skateboarding on landslides in California, on a buckled road in Napa California after an earthquake, and inline skating after an earthquake in Chile.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Marsden Fund [grant number UOW1504].