Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Youth sport is often prefaced as an accessible social practice facilitating development and wellbeing, yet social controls and inequalities abound along racial, gender, and sexual divisions. In efforts of transformative theoretical manoeuvring, the purpose of the paper is to deploy assemblage thinking as attunement to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research. A rationale for assemblage thinking is provided, followed by explanations of what assemblage thinking can do. Assemblage thinking is then deployed, situating race, gender, and sexuality as provisional performative doings. Key considerations are offered as to how youth sport researchers can engage in performative participation, acting as becoming-resources who consider the ever-evolving dynamics of academia and capitalism. Assemblage thinking is positioned as a provincial lens that can instigate more sustainable transformative research.

Keywords

transformative capitalism relationality immanence materiality

Youth sport is defined as an organised and most often adult supervised activity where youth practice/play in different leagues, clubs, or associations operating at varying levels (e.g., local, regional, state, provincial). Youth sport participation occurs on a shifting continuum of competitiveness (i.e., recreational, developmental, elite) and usually culminates in varying forms of end-of-season tournaments or championships. According to Dorsch et al. (2022), the youth sport system encompasses many individuals (i.e., parents, siblings, peers, coaches, referees, administrators) and contextual influences that impact youth's experiences of and outcomes derived from participation. To this day, in most social circles, youth sport remains positioned as a movement-based practice with inherent virtues that can promote personal and collective wellbeing (Coakley, 2021; Kwauk, 2022). Although there is abundant literature on the benefits of youth sport participation (e.g., Anderson-Butcher, 2019; Holt et al., 2017), evidence continues to accrue that youth sport may not be reaching its declared ideals due to asymmetric distributions of power woven into its structure (Whitley et al., 2021). Coakley (2021) has long denounced the great sport myth (i.e., sport's purported goodness) as misbehaviour and maltreatment continue to propagate. Youth sport thus operates as an increasingly professionalised practice entrenched in neoliberal ideals privileging competitive reward structures. It also acts as an archetype of meritocracy and social order along defined racial and gender lines. Although youth sport is prefaced as accessible, it most often affords the privileged open entry while forcing others to constantly struggle against naturalised systems of advantage (Barnes & Adams, 2021). Scholars have discussed how youth sport perpetuates social controls designed to help participants develop economically productive skills needed to secure stable employment (Ronkainen et al., 2021). This instrumental approach reinforces neoliberal logics prioritising the shaping of youth, with little efforts made to change the very structures known to perpetuate long-standing inequalities. Youth sport thus inculcates youth to conform to normative practices through a steady regimen of resilience and self-discipline needed to “make it” in a competitive world (Kwauk, 2022).

As Whitley et al. (2021) noted, inequalities are pervasive in youth sport and have grown since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, intensifying calls for researchers to adopt alternative lenses to confront increasing complexities related to race, gender, and sexuality. Grove and Pugh (2015) stated how socialisation forges truths that objectify through artificial binaries, enframing identities and disciplining bodies. Youth sport is not immune to such objectification and efforts are needed to unsettle binarised identities through transformative theoretical manoeuvring that challenges how race, gender, and sexuality are studied in youth sport research. Alternative modes of thinking should be allowed to take flight and enable researchers to inquire in areas diverging from conventional humanist onto-epistemologies. Given our current anthropogenic climate change, racial injustice, and gender inequality, we should make efforts to conduct research that recognises the complex forces shaping embodied movement (Fullagar, 2020). Assemblage thinking can help youth sport researchers conceive of race, gender, and sexuality as performative doings, paving the way for envisaging a different kind of youth sport experience.

Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to deploy assemblage thinking as attunement to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research. Attunement refers to letting one's internal state resonate with ways of knowing that decentre the subject and recognise shared human/nonhuman agency. Assemblage thinking is positioned as offering a distinct viewpoint enabling researchers to “unpick the structures, dynamics and ruptures that ultimately make up the social” (Dewsbury, 2012, p. 149). The paper is organised in three sections. First, assemblage thinking is defined for what it is and what it can do. Second, assemblage thinking is deployed to attune to race, gender, and sexuality. Third, key considerations are offered by situating youth sport along the forces of academia and capitalism. It should be noted that the arguments put forth and the examples provided are targeted at youth sport researchers, yet most of the claims made for attuning to race, gender, and sexuality from the lens of assemblage thinking are also highly relevant to sport researchers working with populations other than youth.

Positionality

The paper coalesces ideas on assemblage thinking from the sport sciences and other fields, bringing together a myriad of notions in conversation with one another. As facilitator of this conversation, I identify as a white man and university professor. I recognise the ethical requirements of how I must constantly attend to the angle of vision I inhabit in my deployment of assemblage thinking and understand how my positionality comes with historical entitlements (Kinkaid, 2020a). I acknowledge how my early socialisation exposed me to master narratives and cultural scripts that largely hid the privileging dynamics of whiteness (Hazelbaker et al., 2022). I recognise how whiteness has an ongoing history of orienting bodies, which directly influences the theoretical space I can take up and what I can accomplish conceptually in terms of attuning to race, gender, and sexuality (Ahmed, 2021). I also understand how assemblage thinking is shaped by colonisation (McLeod & Fullagar, 2021) and that I espouse a minoritarian view of race, gender, and sexuality from a majoritarian position. Consistent with the work of Rosiek et al. (2020), I apprehend how Indigenous studies deploy agent ontologies with considerable explanatory power in areas where assemblage thinking and other new materialist and posthumanist theories have identified limitations. Thus, I must constantly reflect on how my embodied/emplaced experiences (or lack thereof) animate and restrict my sense-making efforts.

I also recognise the ontological tension of situating my “self” in an identarian position in a paper in which I propose a move away from fixed identities. I nonetheless do so given that assemblage ideals of becoming and transformation have historically been unevenly distributed (Kinkaid, 2020b). As Braidotti (1996) stated, many oppressed groups have long fought and continue to fight to gain symbolic presence they may not wish to relinquish in the ethos of assemblage thinking that eschews identities. I must therefore acknowledge how my identarian position affords me the privileges to engage in philosophical/theoretical wanderings. In sum, I recognise my privileged position and accept the responsibility to situate with critical capacity assemblage thinking in attuning to race, gender, and sexuality. This responsibility is enacted with genuine efforts to deploy assemblage thinking as a transversal relational ethics (Braidotti, 2020).

What Assemblage Thinking Is

The concept of assemblage was initially theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and has since been deployed by scholars in a variety of fields, some of which adhere to the original principles (e.g., Buchanan, 2021) while others diverge in somewhat different directions (e.g., Delanda, 2016). In the present paper, assemblage thinking is situated within Deleuze and Guattari's original formulation of agencement, the French to English translation of assemblage that denotes “to piece together” (Nail, 2017). To build arguments for assemblage thinking, the paper pieces together ideas from the sport sciences (e.g., Markula, 2019), human geography (e.g., Kinkaid, 2020a; Saldanha, 2012), critical feminism (Puar, 2012), sociology (e.g., Fox & Alldred, 2013), and policy studies (e.g., Savage, 2020) that have deployed the concept of assemblage in various manners to situate race, gender, and sexuality beyond conventional humanist positionings. Given the eclectic origins of these ideas, it should be noted that assemblage thinking is utilised as an umbrella concept casting a wide lens on how bodies assemble in ongoing repatternings and how life comes into existence through relations. Three key tenets of assemblage thinking are explained (i.e., relationality, immanence, materiality), building a rationale for an ontological shift in youth sport research.

Relationality

An assemblage refers to an open non-totalisable sum of actants building relations and linking parts in decentred arrangements of co-functioning (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The Latourian term actant entails material-semiotic entities with capabilities to modify. The term actant is favoured in the present paper given that it refers to neither subject nor object but rather encompasses bodies, things, intensities, speeds, and emotions with no fixed identity that provisionally stratify while always remaining open to transformation (Latour, 2005). Assemblages involve the contingent congealing of disparate actants coming together to do something (Grosz, 1994a). In their congealing, assemblages convey territorialising properties concurrently constraining and enabling various forms of doing. Actants do not pre-exist relations but come to be through what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) termed affect, which operates as a “pre-individual capacity to affect and be affected. It can be productively thought as an intensive, relational and atmospheric force that surrounds extensive bodies and charges them with certain possibilities for becoming-otherwise” (Pugh & Grove, 2017, p. 1138).

The relations of assemblages differ from those of systems. Actants in assemblages are conditioned but never determined by relations; they retain their autonomy as they are always in relations of exteriority (Anderson et al., 2012). Assemblages have no essence (i.e., the relations are the assemblage) and simply hold together loose ad hoc groupings of actants that can be everywhere/nowhere (Savage, 2020). In contrast, constituent parts in systems have relations of interiority (Savage, 2020). For example, in an animal system, organs operate in internal logics and depend on one another for the whole system to function. Assemblage thinking thus offers a compelling alternative to humanist identities/systems that can be deployed as transformative theoretical manoeuvring in youth sport research (Kinkaid, 2020b).

Another key feature in the relational composition of assemblages is agency. Historically, agency has been celebrated as a distinctively human attribute but in assemblage thinking, humans are not the only agentic actants with the rest of the world acted upon. Agency is dispersed among actants that hold power to affect as they mingle with other actants (Anderson et al., 2012). Assemblage thinking displaces agentic power from humans while still accepting that some actants may hold more agency than others (Buchanan, 2021). In their uneven congealing, assemblages distribute agency through acentered flows of affect that can splinter rhizomatically (Savage, 2020). As Kinkaid (2020a, p. 463) stated, “assemblage connotes not a central governing power, nor a power distributed equally, but power as plurality in transformation”.

According to Puar (2012), the halting of motion (i.e., being) produces a need to locate, which has trapped humans for centuries in the logics of identity. In assemblage thinking, humans are not unitary sovereign selves with a fixed nature. Rather, humans are multiplicities with no clear dividing line between what is “I” and “not-I”. The boundary of the human does not end at the skin (Puar, 2012). Identities thus lose their position of privilege when humans are instead seen as conglomerations of forces producing/being produced by continuous change (Gibson et al., 2021). The indeterminacy of existence deterritorialises identities as there is simply the contingent iterative performativity of multiplicities provisionally linking.

Immanence

In an ontology of immanence, there is no stasis, the world is always in motion (Saldanha, 2006). Assemblages relentlessly territorialise just as they reconfigure through constant bombardment from transgressing lines of flight (Savage, 2020). A shift in terminology from the pinned down retroactive positioning of “being” to the creative and polymorphous movements of “becoming” is thus required (Puar, 2012). In an immanent world, the self is always recreated, whereby “becoming expresses a nonlinearity that nevertheless has directionality” (Gibson et al., 2021, p. 295). Assemblage thinking thus attends to the world's messy relations that can only be explained by immanent movement and change (Anderson et al., 2012).

Materiality

Assemblage thinking attunes to matter and meaning as having the same ontological status. The human condition is one of natureculture, where biology is relentlessly cultural and historical. A priori divisions between human/nonhuman and matter/meaning are untenable as affective forces are constantly suturing the fabric of existence. In situating human existence, Saldanha (2015, p. 208) stressed how “everything about the human species, even language, fully retains animal, vegetal and geophysical strata”. Assemblage thinking attunes to the vitality of matter in invoking the thoughts/discourses constituting human experience (Bennett, 2005). Matter is a doing and we are never outside its embroiling stickiness (Puar, 2012).

Ontological Shift

To attune differently to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research, an ontological shift extending beyond humanist thought is required. As an alternative lens, assemblage thinking attends to how the material and the semiotic share the same ontological status and how reality is shaped by shared agency between varied actants (Saldanha, 2006). Recent scholarship (e.g., Hayhurst et al., 2021a; Newman et al., 2020) has illustrated the worth of exploring race, gender, and sexuality through a relational, immanent, and material lens, providing new insights into the complex landscape that is contemporary sport and physical culture. Such an ontological shift allows for richer analyses of how the provisional entity we call “youth sport” is not merely socially constructed but constantly materialises in new ways. As Darnell (2020) discussed, sport is real and has agentic capacities, meaning that our analyses should include material and discursive elements. We can better inquire on youth sport by seeing it as an entity of ever-evolving complexity. Assemblage thinking can help interrogate the forces shaping youth sport and its material-semiotic entrenchment in race, gender, and sexuality.

What Assemblage Thinking Can Do

Due to its distinct deployment of relationality, immanence, and materiality, assemblage thinking offers researchers a lens for rethinking what youth sport can become beyond its humanist boundaries. Assemblage thinking provides a lexicon enabling researchers to articulate youth sport as a material-semiotic arrangement in ongoing composition, breaking from network/system logics focused on essence and identities (Anderson et al., 2012; Dewsbury, 2012). The engineering of fixed identities circumscribes what can actualise from youth sport research, propagating a limited imaginary depotentialising change. Grosz et al. (2017) urged researchers to create spaces where novel thinking can arise and invent new collective life.

Assemblage thinking can contribute to the study of race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport by moving from humanist notions of self-contained subjects with fixed identities to identities being performatively produced by discontinuous and non-totalised selves (Benozzo et al., 2019). The intersectional identarian approach is thus questioned, whereby “intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented – if not complicated and reconceptualized – by a notion of assemblage” (Puar, 2012, p. 50). According to Grosz (1994b), intersectional subject positionings reinforce notions of static identity and do not account for the relational, immanent, and material configurations of race, gender, and sexuality. Hence, the retrospective ordering of intersectional identities creates problematic investments in the subject as the continued preferred site for political intervention (Puar, 2012). Ultimately, the multiplying categorisations of intersectional identarian politics have led to the “exhaustion of the subject through ever-more-intricate social positioning, [which] is thus one justification offered for a move to assemblage thinking” (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017, p. 1524). In efforts to address identity politics from an alternate angle, assemblage thinking allows identities to be articulated not as stable properties but as performative doings, providing a lens for how “molecular forces continually upset the topological localizability of a body” (Puar, 2012, p. 62).

By steering away from subjects with stable intersecting identities and instead situating the production of identities as an event-ness (Puar, 2012), researchers can better attune to how actants assemble in youth sport in unequal formations privileging some while marginalising others (Hayhurst et al., 2021a). By escaping binarised corporalities (Grosz, 1994a), assemblage thinking is emancipatory in the sense that it “opens possibilities to invent new ways of relating to the other that do not reduce the other to a form that can be assimilated” (Grove & Pugh, 2015, p. 2). Letting go of binaries enables actants to be assessed on the links they establish, shifting attention from what actants are to what actants do. Such a shift can produce critical accounts of race, gender, and sexuality that attune to agency as a distributive force inducing changes not solely under the purview of human intentionality (Bennett, 2005). Assemblage thinking can thus be mobilised to situate how actants within youth sport assemblages become racialised, gendered, and sexualised, producing different health outcomes for different participants (Kinkaid, 2020a). By being oriented toward inducing difference in kind, not just in degree, assemblage thinking enables youth sport researchers to understand how “the world is now characterised by flows, connections and becomings whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more recursive than dialectical, more emergent than totalising” (Dewsbury, 2012, p. 149). Assemblage thinking thus instigates critically informed prospects for becoming-otherwise by complexifying the field of reality in youth sport research (Grove & Pugh, 2015).

Assemblage Thinking and Race in Youth Sport Research

Humanist considerations of race are situated as discursively practiced by privileged or othered subjects and anchored in identity politics, fixed categorisations, and essentialising discourses (Saldanha, 2006). Alternatively, assemblage thinking situates race ontologically as an emergent performative technology of differentiation ((Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017; Pugh & Grove, 2017). Where we once saw essence in fixed beings, we should now see performance in temporary becomings, shifting attention in youth sport research from questions of being (i.e., what is race?) to questions of doing (i.e., what does race do?). Given that race “is best captured by the connective, intense, spatiality of an assemblage” (Swanton, 2010, p. 460), assemblage thinking can be deployed to situate race as a performance constantly recomposing youth sport.

In the case of race, this performative doing is conceptualised as racialising assemblages, situated as fluid patterns of meanings and practices producing continuously evolving social orders (Kinkaid, 2020a). Racialising assemblages allow researchers to examine “how fuzzy racial summaries distributed across a whole host of bodies, objects, and spaces become the basis for rapid practices of perception, judgment, and action” (Swanton, 2010, p. 460). Of foremost importance in understanding racialising assemblages is that no body has a race, but that bodies become racialised through racially charged affects producing phenomena that have, over the course of history, reinforced arbitrary racial divisions and upheld the uneven differentiation of bodies (Kinkaid, 2020a). Saldanha (2006, p. 19) stated that the actants within racialising assemblages are ever-changing, but can include DNA, phenotype, discursive practices, clothes, and food, to name a few. Race is thus an unrelenting performative doing mediating encounters in racialising assemblages, inducing racial dispositions (e.g., suspicions, worries, avoidances) and inciting racial actions (e.g., profanities, exclusions, rumours) that stir visceral fears and uphold regimes of dominance (Swanton, 2010). Youth sport assemblages are replete of such dispositions and actions that vilify bodies through a racially charged visual economy. For instance, the banning of head coverings in youth sport (Elassar, 2020) occurs through material-semiotic flows of racialising assemblages, wherein bans are affectively performed through the meshing of colour, culture, rules, athletes, race, religion, power, uniforms, and faith.

In racialising assemblages, racial affects discipline bodies and enact asymmetrical distributions of privilege that are the resultant of what Saldanha (2006) called the stickiness and viscosity of race, a propensity to capture bodies and induce thickenings that segregate. The viscosity of race suppresses mobility, disadvantaging bodies shackled in continuous cycles of oppression all the while advantaging bodies comfortably positioned in havens of privilege. For example, Swanton (2010) argued how criminality often sticks to coloured bodies while Saldanha (2006, p. 18) stated how whiteness “is about the sticky connections between property, privilege, and a paler skin”. These racial edicts coagulate on bodies, stereotyping dispositions and actions. Due to the asymmetrical distribution of the stickiness/viscosity of race (i.e., more fluid in some bodies, more fixing in others), assemblage thinking offers a critical lens for grasping why some bodies are more mobile than others (Kinkaid, 2020a). In youth sport, researchers can deploy assemblage thinking to apprehend how racial inequality sticks to some bodies and how would-be transformations are often diffused by those in power, further cementing their dominance.

Despite its stickiness and historical disciplining, if race is a performative doing, then it can be leveraged to reimagine subjectification (Kinkaid, 2020a). In assemblage thinking, race is a provisional territory that can be reassembled as a performative doing which does not need to be vilified. Instead, it can multiply from the virtual in innumerable messy imaginings, a thousand tiny races becoming beyond current taxonomies through affects that unfix sticky identities. These affects can produce an open-endedness for bodies to relate in manners that break from the antagonising powers of racism (Lim, 2010). As Saldanha (2006, p. 21) explained:

Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic … What is needed is an affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium, liberatory … race exists in its true mode when it is no longer stifled by racism.

Assemblage Thinking, Gender, and Sexuality in Youth Sport Research

Youth sport has long been and continues to be enframed in essentialising binaries that shape participants experiences from an early age (Messner, 2011). Youth sport binaries exclude nonconforming youth who have long been subjected to violence/erasure, their very existence deemed a threat to established categories (e.g., see the case of British Triathlon; Reuters, 2022). To uphold the legitimacy of gender/sexuality divides, devices of bodily surveillance/control help maintain the normative structures of youth sport. Colonial relics and contemporary forces each enact upon youth sport a mooring viscosity that aggregates bodies into strict categories (Fullagar, 2020). An ontological reassessment is needed, given that the social categories of youth sport (i.e., boys’ teams, girls’ teams) tame bodies into subordination through enduring relations of dominance. Hence, efforts of transformative theoretical manoeuvring are needed from researchers to attune to the performative doings of gender/sexuality in youth sport.

Assemblage thinking invokes from the virtual notions of how “there might be a multiplicity of gendered and sexual becomings emergent in various locations, increasingly unbounded from the categorical specificity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and/or sexuality and gender itself” (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017, p. 1526). Pape (2021), in examining biological variables in animal research, debunked notions of universal male/female phenotypes and instead pointed to the indeterminate multiplicity of gender and sexuality. The context-dependent character of what we call biology generates situational actualisations of gender and sexuality that fundamentally cannot “simply reside perpetually in a cell” (Pape, 2021, p. 287).

In assemblage thinking, gender and sexuality have no essence, eliminating the need for the naturalising narratives and fixed categories permeating youth sport. Rather, gender and sexuality are entangled as performative doings that are elusive in their multiplying enactments. Gender and sexuality are indeterminate embodied variations; they cannot fit neatly in biological classifications because biology “is always already dynamically entangled with social processes” (Pape, 2021, p. 278). Gender and sexuality as performative doings occur through constant changes in the event-ness of identity (Puar, 2012). By transcending humanist identities, assemblage thinking can be deployed to actualise from the virtual a thousand tiny genders and sexualities proliferating unboundedly in their always provisional enactment (Puar, 2015). In moving past fixed identities and their territorialising effects (e.g., bisexuality as an internalisation of binarised sexuality; Grosz, 1994a), affective energies can roam more freely (Puar, 2015). In youth sport assemblages, youth are positioned as lively actants of this performative doing as they experience ever-evolving performances of gender and sexuality. For youth sport researchers, assemblage thinking can induce lines of flight enabling portrayals of youth sport as open-ended and ever-changing rather than categorical and static, thereby producing deterritorialisations of gender and sexuality that can inspire more inclusive practices for all youth sport participants.

Nevertheless, despite its theoretically unbounded potential, it should be noted that sexuality in sport remains highly territorialised due to the continued privileging of the human body as the primary site of sexuality (Fox & Alldred, 2013). This interioristic viewpoint inhibits sexuality's capacity for nomadic wanderings and narrows it to often derogatory depictions. For instance, sexuality in sport most often manifests itself as genitally focused, with sporting bodies and their body parts fetishised. Participants in many sports (e.g., women's beach volleyball, women's beach handball) are forced to wear revealing attire that pornify bodies in the name of financial profit (Gross, 2021). Assemblage thinking can help researchers contest normative territorialised renderings of sexuality in sport and instead produce new becomings enabling sporting bodies to move with greater dignity. Sexuality is everywhere and sexual agency should be decentred from the self-contained genitalised subject and instead be seen as an affective flow producing sexual capacities in a diversity of bodies (Fox & Alldred, 2013). Assemblage thinking moves beyond the subordinating chokehold of identity, instead situating gender and sexuality as performative doings that are rhizomatically dispersed across space and time (Grosz, 1994a).

Assemblage thinking can also be deployed to grasp how sporting bodies are entangled with material forces exuding affects on the performative doings of gender and sexuality in/out of youth sport. As Hayhurst et al. (2021b, p. 147) stated, “there are complex and messy relationships between sport and development, colonialism, gender equality, and environmental sustainability”. For example, while studying a sport for development programme for young Nicaraguan women, Hayhurst et al. (2021b) showed how lengthy rain seasons created landslides that damaged roads, keeping young women at home, away from sport, and instead engaging in domestic labour and enduring domestic violence. Assemblage thinking can help researchers appreciate the material-semiotic meshwork that precipitates climate change, invokes sport (non)participation, and ultimately shapes gender inequalities (Kinkaid, 2020a). Youth sport is not immune to the violences of climate change and youth sport researchers should consider how environmental degradation can essentialise gender roles and exacerbate gendered divisions of labour (Hayhurst et al., 2021b). It is crucial to recognise that gender and sexuality are intertwined with youth sport participants’ racialised experiences and together impact perceptions/treatments of youth in sport informed by histories of asymmetrical power distribution (Saldanha, 2011).

Implications for Youth Sport Research

Participation in society in contemporary times occurs within the constitutive powers of capitalism that ceaselessly produce inequality and oppression (Saldanha, 2015). If researchers are to address youth sport's binaries and normative practices, then new lenses with which to research youth sport should be actualised. Youth sport researchers should make efforts to reflect on their shared responsibility to produce scholarship that creates new horizons for what youth sport can do, differently. As Bennett (2005) stated, assemblage thinking can help generate in researchers an awareness that responsibility lies not in autonomous subjects but rather in the assemblages we find ourselves participating. Thus, researchers who attune to notions of shared agency are best positioned to deploy relational forms of care and have an increased awareness of how development and wellbeing assemble (Gibson et al., 2021). Alternative reframings beyond interioristic psychological approaches are vital, where development and wellbeing are seen as more than just measurable internal attributes housed in subjects. Assemblage thinking can help situate how development and wellbeing are mediated by more-than-human forces that researchers can attune to through performative participation.

Performative Participation

In assemblage thinking, the ethics of responsible scholarship can operate through what Grove and Pugh (2015) situated as performative participation, where researchers act as becoming-resources who deploy their affective capacities in recognition of their particular angle of vision and through their shared agency with other actants. Performative participation “replaces a liberal will to truth with a transgressive ethos of living together” (Grove & Pugh, 2015, p. 7), thereby compelling new rhythms of sensibility in research (Pugh & Grove, 2017). Situating research as performative participation can help free the researcher from the insider/outsider binary, instead operating in the middle, always already entangled in the assemblages studied. Performative participation can compel researchers to appreciate the complex manners by which actants (e.g., researchers, race, athletes, culture, coaches, norms, gender) in youth sport relate.

A performative participation approach to research coincides with recent calls (e.g., Thorpe et al., 2021; Woods et al., 2022) for the sport sciences to imagine sustainable and transformative ways of doing research that attune to responsibility, curiosity, and care. As Gerrard et al. (2017) argued, to enact sustainable transformative research, we should sensibly attend to the many actants historically excluded/erased if we are to generate research approaches that confront global inequalities. Performative participation as an ethos of research opens ontological passageways that challenge the limits of what youth sport can do. When researchers recognise that identities are not stored in subjects but are actively performed through relations, more just ways to imagine race, gender, and sexuality can arise and actants can move more freely in youth sport assemblages. To push against the reproduction of uneven power relations defining the current social condition, performative participation through sustainable transformative research should be made to proliferate in youth sport. Two considerations are offered below, intended to instigate in youth sport researchers important reflections and relational possibilities.

Researching Youth Sport Differently

A first key consideration for youth sport researchers is to recognise the many pressures of neoliberal academia that obstruct original transversal modes of research (Pugh & Grove, 2017). Importantly, a greater recognition is needed in terms of how academic reward structures territorialise researchers, those in youth sport included, into prolific yet docile orderly workers who write grants, collect data, and write papers in order to fill research gaps and create impact (Gerrard et al., 2017; Pugh & Grove, 2017). Chu and Evans (2021) discussed how working on too-novel ideas outside of existing schemas is often discouraged, leaving them to ponder if “The more-is-better, quantity metric-driven nature of today's scientific enterprise may ironically retard fundamental progress … Could we be missing fertile new paradigms because we are locked into overworked areas of study?” (p. 4). The constant quest for funding, impact factors, and h-index scores often induces creative inertia paralysing transformative research. Youth sport researchers should consider how they can actively work to problematise business-like approaches to research in their departments and ask if/how it is conceivable to be “scored” differently in the future.

To proliferate minoritarian puissance in youth sport research, researchers should assess the powers at their disposal to legitimately challenge the status quo. First, we should contemplate how we can challenge how we write, with Kinnunen et al. (2021) recommending venturing beyond prescribed mechanical assembly-line writing. By breaking from static prose and writing in ways that attune to how we feel, move, and think, we can theorise differently, converse more genuinely, and correspond better to one another (Woods et al., 2022), giving rise to transformative possibilities for how race, gender, and sexuality can be reimagined in youth sport research. To truly challenge how we write, we must first experiment with new ways of thinking, a process optimised through contact with different literatures. In the sport sciences, there is a growing body of literature that youth sport researchers can access touching on assemblage (e.g., Camiré, 2021) but also postqualitative inquiry (e.g., Beggan, 2022; Monforte & Smith, 2021), new materialism (Monforte, 2018; Thorpe et al., 2020), and posthumanism (e.g., Linghede, 2018). Youth sport researchers should also consult the 2021 double issue in Somatechnics devoted to sport, physical culture, and new materialisms exploring intriguing topics such as materiality in coaching, athleisure, and Indigenous materialisms.

Second, youth sport researchers should move beyond the idea that development and wellbeing result from the individual accomplishments of resilient youth who take responsibility to self-actualise (Kwauk, 2022). Such individualism fails to account for asymmetric distributions of power along lines of race, gender, and sexuality, confining our imaginary to binaries of what is successful/unsuccessful development and who are well/unwell. Rather, approaches to development in youth sport should account for human/nonhuman relations, with, for example, life skills reimagined as relationally adaptive know-hows (Camiré, 2021). Moreover, wellbeing in youth sport research should be reimagined as always provisionally assembled through bodily-affective processes that actualise differently in different youth sport assemblages (Coffey, 2022).

Third, Markula (2019) questioned the research enterprise's reliance on discourses and semiotics, stating that “We cannot, after all, include the full force of the moving body in our research through interviews or perhaps any purely language driven research technique. What instead, then?” (p. 7). To help answer Markula's question, youth sport researchers should consider using movement as a research tool, transcending humanist reliance on words. Although bodily performances may not “score” as high as published papers in academic metrics, they offer exciting opportunities to create knowledge from moving bodies that complements what can be known through language. Assemblage thinking allows researchers to mobilise youth sport research as a material endeavour attuning to the meshing of bodies, motion, and meaning. Openness and creativity are needed if youth sport researchers are to affirmatively problematise normative renderings of race, gender, and sexuality. Moves beyond reliance on the empirical are warranted for youth sport researchers to create knowledge differently (Benozzo et al., 2019).

Youth Sport Research and Capitalism

A second key consideration for youth sport researchers is to appreciate the situatedness of youth sport within the machinic powers of capitalism (Saldanha, 2020). As Saldanha (2012, 2015) argued, capitalism has reached such formidable heights that it criss-crosses with extensive territorialising force almost all assemblages on the planet, absorbing and subsuming them. Youth sport assemblages are no exception, with their current formulations operating globally as a multibillion-dollar industry (Gregory, 2017). Youth sport researchers are thus constantly confronting the forces of capitalism in ways that spread the contagion of racial, gender, and sexual oppression (Braidotti, 2020). Capitalism acts as a racialising assemblage and masquerades systemic racial violences as business imperatives necessary for the world to function (Lim, 2010). In a marketing scheme covering the entire planet, capitalism exudes the “immense functionality of consumerism in chaining populations to the very megamachine which oppresses them” (Saldanha, 2020, p. 23). Youth sport is entangled in these chaining affects, feeding a sporting goods industry reliant on global racial divisions of labour to produce sporting apparel and equipment that contribute to the planet's environmental degradation (Brice & Thorpe, 2021). Intricate forces of capitalist expansion abound in sport where political manoeuvring on the world stage sways the allocation of mega sporting events, setting in motion migrations, exploitation, corruption, and death for countless racialised migrant workers (Iskander, 2022).

Performative participation and transformative research are needed in youth sport to account for how capitalism, racial discrimination, and environmental issues are inseparable (Alaimo, 2019; Hayhurst et al., 2021b). Instead of uncritically accepting the status quo, youth sport researchers can leverage assemblage thinking to help reveal the messy arrangements of how capitalism infests everyday imaginings of youth sport, with, for example, nursery children now being actively recruited by top-flight football clubs (Shah, 2021). Capitalism's immense productivity has self-destruction as its only inevitable outcome and if left unhinged, it will continue to racialise and sexualise to toxifying effects through the justified necessity of doing business (Saldanha, 2020). Youth sport researchers can take active measures to account for capitalism's relentless exploitative tendencies by putting forth transformative formulations of youth sport (e.g., Welch et al., 2021) that resist instant capture from capitalistic forces. For example, researchers should consider youth sport's sizable carbon footprint, as play (e.g., games, tournaments) coalesces actants (e.g., uniforms, equipment, hotels, food, transportation) that produce considerable emissions and increase landfill footprints worldwide (Thorpe et al., 2021). Moreover, play justifies the reconfiguration of mountains and fertile lands into alpine skiing facilities, football fields, and golf courses that have long-lasting impacts on many ecosystems.

Capitalist consumerism in youth sport is thus intricately connected to the planet's environmental degradation, inducing affects of racial, gender, and sexual oppression rooted in colonial vestiges of power (Brice & Thorpe, 2021). Thorpe et al. (2021) stressed how “new ways of thinking are needed to foster a more productive politics of physical and cultural pursuits in environmentally vulnerable spaces” (p. 365). Such new ways of thinking involve a move beyond humanist logics that the earth exists for us. Here, “we” and “us” are deployed in recognition of pluriversal histories (McLeod & Fullagar, 2021), signifying how we are all in this planetary condition together, while recognising the asymmetry of human oppression and its resulting slow violence (Alaimo, 2019). The “we” is thus heterogenous from a race, gender, and sexuality standpoint, given that we differ greatly in our access to social entitlements, safety, prosperity, and services (Braidotti, 2020). Capitalism is thus inescapably racial, gendered, and sexual, spurred by “the white captains of the capitalist system who have created a new geological epoch” (Saldanha, 2020, p. 13). Assemblage thinking can help researchers situate how capitalism's endless expansion has arisen and is sustained by racialising and sexualising assemblages.

Assemblage thinking provides youth sport researchers a lens to grasp how agency extends beyond human control, with life a “generative force beneath, below, and beyond what we humans have made of it” (Braidotti, 2020, p. 468). The steady dissolution of human exceptionalism invokes tantalising opportunities for youth sport researchers to view humans as embedded in the world as opposed to being privileged to it (Thorpe et al., 2021). Moving forward, researchers should consider how human actants in youth sport assemblages share agency with nonhuman actants in the ever-changing movement-based practice we call sport.

Concluding Thoughts

In the present paper, assemblage thinking was deployed to attune to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research. Although assemblage thinking offers a lens through which youth sport researchers can eschew boundaries, part with identities, and decentre the subject, we should remain mindful of the biopolitics that have long negated symbolic presence to groups historically prevented from securing emancipatory positions (Braidotti, 1996; Fox & Alldred, 2013). Hence, critical deployments of assemblage thinking are required that attend to its provincial (i.e., founded in regional Eurocentric concerns) and pluriversal (i.e., denoting many co-existing lifeworlds) situatedness (Zembylas, 2018). Seeing assemblage thinking as provincial allows for varied perspectives to be recognised in continued efforts to decolonise thinking in academia. Youth sport researchers should account for how humanist identarian categories remain in the lifeworld of most, yet can be reassessed through assemblage thinking so that one day, race, gender, and sexuality may be set free from racism, genderism, and sexism (Saldanha, 2006).

In sum, readers should treat the present paper as an incomplete experiment intended to illuminate the affects actualising race, gender, and sexuality as performative doings in youth sport assemblages. Although focus was on race, gender, and sexuality, future work is needed to situate how disability, class, religion, and other actants produce privileging/oppressing affects in youth sport assemblages. Assemblage thinking was modestly deployed in hopes that a particular focus on how things assemble can produce fertile ontological alternatives to more territorialised and overworked modes of thinking in youth sport research (Chu & Evans, 2021). The aim is to instigate lines of flight creating more liveable youth sport spaces for all through humility and cooperation (Gibson et al., 2021). As Braidotti (2020, p. 466) optimistically proclaimed, “this is a time to organize, not to a[nta]gonize, we must co-construct different platforms of becoming”.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Martin Camiré

Author Biography

Martin Camiré is a Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Through his research,Prof. Camiré is interested in examining various aspects of development in the context of sport. Prof. Camiré's teaching interests lie in the areas of intervention,health promotion,and qualitative inquiry.

References

Ahmed

(2021). A phenomenology of whiteness. In Laubscher

Hook

Desai

M. U.

(Eds.), Fanon, phenomenology, and psychology (pp. 229–246). Routledge.

Alaimo

(2019). Wanting all the species to be: Extinction, environmental visions, and intimate aesthetics. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(102), 398–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2019.1698284

Anderson

Kearnes

McFarlane

Swanton

(2012). On assemblages and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820612449261

Anderson-Butcher

(2019). Youth sport as a vehicle for social development. Kinesiology Review, 8(3), 180–187. https://doi.org/10.1123/kr.2019-0029

Barnes

Adams

M. L.

(2021). A large and troubling iceberg: Sexism and misogyny in women’s work as sport coaches. Sports Coaching Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/21640629.2021.1975940

Beggan

(2022). What can post qualitative inquiry offer physical activity intervention? An example of intergenerational physical activity. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2022.2057569

Bennett

(2005). The agency of assemblages and the North American blackout. Public Culture, 17(3), 445–465. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-17-3-445

Benozzo

Carey

Cozza

Elmenhorst

Fairchild

Koro-Ljungberg

Taylor

C. A.

(2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work & Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12260

Braidotti

(1996). Nomadism with a difference: Deleuze’s legacy in a feminist perspective. Man and World, 29(3), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01248440

10.

Braidotti

(2020). “We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same. Bioethical Inquiry, 17, 465–469. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8

11.

Brice

J. E.

Thorpe

(2021). Toward more-than-human understandings of sport and the environment: A new materialist analysis of everyday fitness practices. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 3, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2021.660935

12.

Buchanan

(2021). Assemblage theory and method. Bloomsbury Academic.

13.

Camiré

(2021). A move to rethink life skills as assemblages: A call to postqualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.2002395

14.

Chu

J. S. G.

Evans

J. A.

(2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. PNAS, 118(41), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021636118

15.

Coakley

(2021). Neoliberalism and community sport coaching in the United States: Meeting challenges with an informed strategy. In Ives

Potrac

Gale

Nelson

(Eds.), Community sport coaching: Policies and practice (pp. 25–44). Routledge.

16.

Coffey

(2022). Assembling wellbeing: Bodies, affects and the ‘conditions of possibility’ for wellbeing. Journal of Youth Studies, 25(1), 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2020.1844171

17.

Darnell

S. C.

(2020). Reassembling sport for development and peace through actor-network theory. In Newman

J. I.

Thorpe

Andrews

D. L.

(Eds.), Sport, physical culture, and the moving body (pp. 229–245). Rutgers University Press.

18.

Delanda

(2016). Asemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press.

19.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

20.

Dewsbury

J. D.

(2012). The Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage: Plastic habits. Area, 43(2), 148–153. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01006.x

21.

Dorsch

T. E.

Smith

A. L.

Blazo

J. A.

Coakley

Côté

Wagstaff

C. R. D.

Warner

King

M. Q.

(2022). Toward an integrated understanding of the youth sport system. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 93(1), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2020.1810847

22.

Elassar

(2020). This Muslim basketball player refused to take off her hijab, opening new doors for athletes of other faiths . https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/07/us/bilqis-abdul-qaadir-basketball-hijab-trnd/index.html

23.

Fox

N. J.

Alldred

(2013). The sexuality-assemblage: Desire, affect, anti-humanism. The Sociological Review, 61(4), 769–789. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12075

24.

Fullagar

(2020). Diffracting mind-body relations: Feminist materialism and the entanglement of physical culture in women’s recovery from depression. In Newman

J. I.

Thorpe

Andrews

D. L.

(Eds.), Sport, physical culture, and the moving body (pp. 170–192). Rutgers University Press.

25.

Gerrard

Rudolph

Sriprakash

(2017). The politics of post-qualitative inquiry: History and power. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(5), 384–394. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800416672694

26.

Gibson

E. B.

Fadyl

J. K.

Terry

Waterworth

Mosleh

Kayes

N. M.

(2021). A posthuman decentring of person-centred care. Health Sociology Review, 30(3), 292–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2021.1975555

27.

Gregory

(2017). How kids’ sports became a $15 billion industry . https://time.com/4913687/how-kids-sports-became-15-billion-industry/

28.

Gross

(2021). Facing outrage over bikini rule, handball federation signals ‘likely’ change . https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/sports/norway-beach-handball-team.html

29.

Grosz

(1994a). A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics. In C. V. Boundas, & D. Olkowski (Eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the theatre of philosophy (pp. 187–210). Routledge.

30.

Grosz

(1994b). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. University of Indiana Press.

31.

Grosz

Yusoff

Clark

(2017). An interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, inhumanism and the biopolitical. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2-3), 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417689899

32.

Grove

Pugh

(2015). Assemblage thinking and participatory development: Potentiality, ethics, biopolitics. Geography Compass, 9(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12191

33.

Hayhurst

L. M. C.

Thorpe

Chawansky

del Soccoro Crus Centeno

(2021b). Entangled human and nonhuman relations in sport, gender and development. In L. M. C. Hayhurst, H. Thorpe, & M. Chawansky (Eds.), Sport, gender, and development: Intersections, innovations and future trajectories (pp. 141–168). Emerald Press.

34.

Hayhurst

L. M. C.

Thorpe

Chawansky

(2021a). Sport, gender and development: Intersections, innovations and future trajectories. Emerald.

35.

Hazelbaker

Spears Brown

Nenadal

Mistry

R. S.

(2022). Fostering anti-racism in white children and youth: Development within contexts. American Psychologist, 77(4), 497–509. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000948

36.

Holt

N. L.

Neely

K. C.

Slater

L. G.

Camiré

Côté

Fraser-Thomas

MacDonald

Strachan

Tamminen

K. A.

(2017). A grounded theory of positive youth development through sport based on results from a qualitative meta-study. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 10(1), 1–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2016.1180704

37.

Iskander

(2022). Qatar’s glittery World Cup disguises a dark reality . https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/25/qatar-world-cup-workers-rights-inequality/

38.

Kinkaid

(2020b). Assemblage as ethos: Conceptual genealogies and political problems. Area, 52(3), 480–487. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12600

39.

Kinkaid

(2020a). Can assemblage think difference? A feminist critique of assemblage geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 44(3), 457–472. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519836162

40.

Kinnunen

V. E.

Wallenius-Korkalo

S. S.

Rantala

P. M.

(2021). Transformative events: Feminist experiments in writing differently. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(2), 656–671. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12606

41.

Kwauk

C. T.

(2022). Empowering girls through sport: A gender transformative approach to life skills? In DeJaeghere

Murphy-Graham

(Eds.), Life skills education for youth: Critical perspectives (pp. 91–111). Springer.

42.

Latour

(2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.

43.

Lim

(2010). Immanent politics: Thinking race and ethnicity through affect and machinism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42(10), 2393–2409. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42234

44.

Linghede

(2018). The promise of glitching bodies in sport: A posthumanist exploration of an intersex phenomenon. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(5), 570–584. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2018.1479980

45.

Markula

(2019). What is new about new materialism for sport sociology? Reflections on body, movement, and culture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2018-0064

46.

McLeod

Fullagar

(2021). Remaking the post ‘human’: A productive problem for health sociology. Health Sociology Review, 30(3), 219–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2021.1990710

47.

Messner

(2011). Gender ideologies, youth sports, and the production of soft essentialism. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(2), 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.28.2.151

48.

Monforte

(2018). What is new in new materialism for a newcomer? Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(3), 378–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2018.1428678

49.

Monforte

Smith

(2021). Introducing postqualitative inquiry in sport and exercise psychology. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2021.1881805

50.

Nail

(2017). What is an assemblage? SubStance 46(1), 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2017.0001

51.

Nash

C. J.

Gorman-Murray

(2017). Sexualities, subjectivities and urban spaces: A case for assemblage thinking. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(11), 1521–1529. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1372388

52.

Newman

J. I.

Thorpe

Andrews

D. L.

(2020). Sport, physical culture, and the moving body: Materialisms, technologies, ecologies. Rutgers University Press.

53.

Pape

(2021). Lost in translation? Beyond sex as a biological variable in animal research. Health Sociology Review, 30(3), 275–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2021.1969981

54.

Puar

J. K.

(2012). I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA, 2(1), 49–66. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486621.

55.

Puar

J. K.

(2015). Homonationalism as assemblage: Viral travels, affective sexualities. Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais, 3(1), 319–337. https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.98

56.

Pugh

Grove

(2017). Assemblage, transversality and participation in the neoliberal university. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(6), 1134–1152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817709478

57.

Reuters (2022). Triathlon-Transgender athletes to compete in ‘open’ category under new British Triathlon policy . https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/triathlon-transgender-athletes-compete-open-category-under-new-british-triathlon-2022-07-06/

58.

Ronkainen

N. J.

Aggerholm

Ryba

T. V.

Allen-Collinson

(2021). Learning in sport: From life skills to existential learning. Sport, Education and Society, 26(2), 214–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1712655

59.

Rosiek

J. L.

Snyder

Pratt

S. L.

(2020). The new materialisms and Indigenous theories of non-human agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), 331–346. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800419830135

60.

Saldanha

(2006). Reontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(1), 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1068/d61j

61.

Saldanha

(2011). The concept of race. Geography (Sheffield, England), 96(1), 27–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167487.2011.12094306

62.

Saldanha

(2012). Assemblage, materiality, race, capital. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 194–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820612449302

63.

Saldanha

(2015). Mechanosphere: Man, earth, capital. In Roffe

Stark

(Eds.), Deleuze and the non/human (pp. 197–216). Palgrave MacMillan.

64.

Saldanha

(2020). A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 12–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819871964

65.

Savage

G. C.

(2020). What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3), 319–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1559760

66.

Shah

(2021). The four-year-old footballer scouted by Arsenal while still at nursery . https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-58988254

67.

Swanton

(2010). Flesh, metal, road: Tracing the machinic geographies of race. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(3), 447–466. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9507

68.

Thorpe

Brice

Clark

(2021). New materialisms, sport and the environment: Imagining new lines of flight. Sport, Education and Society, 26(4), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1837097

69.

Thorpe

Brice

J. E.

Clark

(2020). Feminist new materialisms, sport, and fitness: A lively entanglement. Palgrave Macmillan.

70.

Welch

Taylor

Gard

(2021). Environmental attunement in health, sport and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 26(4), 339–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1890009

71.

Whitley

M. A.

Smith

A. L.

Dorsch

T. E.

Bowers

M. T.

Centeio

E. E.

(2021). Reenvisioning postpandemic youth sport to meet young people’s mental, emotional, and social needs. Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, 6(4), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1249/TJX.0000000000000177

72.

Woods

C. T.

Araújo

Davids

(2022). Joining with the conversation: Research as a sustainable practice in the sport sciences. Sports Medicine Open, 8(102), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-022-00493-0

73.

Zembylas

(2018). The entanglement of decolonial and posthuman perspectives: Tensions and implications for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education. Parallax, 24(3), 254–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2018.1496577