Embodied Contradictions: Moral World-Making in Sport

Application summary

This comparative research project brings together three case studies in distinct sporting contexts and is grounded in the conviction that contemporary sport is not merely leisure or spectacle. Instead, we approach it as a complex domain where market logics, normative bodily imaginaries, and social identities converge, where socio-cultural norms and values are imposed upon individuals but also actively contested, and where alternative moralities, subjectivities, and solidarities can emerge. We conceptualise the processes by which sport translates neoliberal pressures into shared values and judgements about what is “good” and “right” but also engenders alternatives to these, as moral world-making. Our comparative design applies this conceptual lens across the three cases to demonstrate how sport both reproduces dominant orders and opens avenues for empowerment and agency. The subprojects scrutinise recreational endurance running in Finland and Estonia, female bodybuilding in China, and football fandom in the UK. Endurance running is explored as a form of neoliberal disciplining of the body but also as a practice in which pain, suffering, and even exercise addiction can be reframed as alternative routes to the “good life.” Female bodybuilding is studied as a feminist reworking of bodily norms within the constraints of biopolitical governance. Football fandom is examined as a struggle to sustain identity under the conditions of increasing commercialisation and technologisation of the game. Methodologically, the subprojects share a qualitative, ethnographic approach that combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography. We will also employ reflexivity and autoethnography, acknowledging our own embodied engagement with the respective sporting contexts, to produce a distinct data layer that is triangulated with interviews and fieldnotes.