Getting Emotional: Using sport to build emotional capital and overcome symbolic violence LAURA GREEN 13 November 2013.

Getting Emotional: Getting Emotional: Using sport to build Using sport to build emotional capital and emotional capital and overcome symbolic violenceovercome symbolic violence

LAURA GREEN

10 April 2023

Background to the research

10 April 2023

• High drop out rates of British young women in sport• Young women report higher levels of dissatisfaction with

PE

Desire to: • conceptualize young people as a resource not a social

problem• go beyond explanation to take action• position young women as decision makers• deliver practitioner research in youth work settings

Feminist Participatory Action Research

• Action Research (McNiff et al. 2003)

Identifies problems, Change to improve, Practitioner research, Political

• Participatory Research (Khanlu & Peter, 2005)

Collaborative, Local knowledge, Eclectic, Benefits to data, Demystification, Reciprocity

• Feminist Participatory Action Research (Frisby et al., 2005) especially focuses on women and girls’ voices and experiences, and was used in this project to find out how wider social ideas about gender and sport could create barriers for individual girls

Phases of the research process

10 April 2023

PHASE ONE PHASE T WO PHASE THR EE o Identified sam ple

groups (young wom en’s group & young m um s youth work groups)

o Establish research relationships

o Engaged in group discussion activities around physical activity

o Young wom en planned own physical activity projects

o Recruitm ent of coaches

o Funding applications

o Project M anagem ent

o Participation in projects

o Participant observations

o (Partial) video diaries

o Review of projects o Evaluation of

processes o Identification of

learning points o Recomm endations

for future projects

Theoretical Framework

• Bourdieu’s notions of ‘capitals’ (economic, social, cultural, symbolic)

• Symbolic Capital: describe forms of capital that are legitimized as valuable, often unrecognized as capital but instead recognized as legitimate competence or authority.

• Diane Reay’s extension of this: ‘Emotional Capital’: access to emotionally values skills and assets, which hold within any social network characterized at least partly by affective ties’

• Bourdieu’s concept of ‘Symbolic Violence’: coercion of the dominated, with their consent, through the development and application of ‘common sense’ knowledges and discourses.

Previous Experiences:Lack of Perceived Sport Related Capital

SOCIAL CAPITALCarrie: I haven’t done sport for

years and I don’t really know anybody sporty. The last lot of sporty people I knew were, like, PE teachers at secondary school, and I hated them

Laura: What about you Karen?Karen: I dunno, I mean I only

really hang around with this lot and none of us are into sport we’re all smokers I think, no-one in my family even does any sport.

PHYSICAL CAPITALLivvy: I used to do sport but then I

fell in love with food, the wrong kind of food and now, the extra weight I’ve got makes me feel like people would just be looking at me thinking what’s she doing here?

Ellie: I won’t go to the gym because I’m fat that’s what puts me off I don’t want to show my fat off

EMOTIONAL CAPITALClare: I know I must admit it is intimidating like when you walk in everyone goes ‘oh’Katie: yeah people do look at you I mean I went with my partner, he signed up for the gym and I went with him and had a look around and just walking around there scared me I didn’t want to go back in there

Previous Experiences:Symbolic Violence in Action

Karen: my teachers were quite competitive as well

Laura: in what way?Karen: well they’d be more praising to the girls

that were the good ones and they’d point out the good ones every time rather than focusing on the others

Clare: they wouldn’t try and encourage you?Karen: no I wouldn’t get any encouragement at

all, no, never any encouragement, I just presumed that obviously I wasn’t good for sport so I just gave up, I made up excuses every PE time like I’d forgotten my shoes or something like that, I always came up with something. I’d always try and miss it.

Carrie: I wasn’t like, the worst at PE but my PE teacher knew I didn’t really like doing PE so she just stopped bothering with me. At the beginning she used to tell me off for not putting in enough effort or talking too much or laughing, a lot of the time because I had a miserable look on my face, but after a while she just switched to ignoring me. I never once got told I had done anything right by her.

The Sports Ethic

Clare: I had a sprained ankle I had to take my crutches off, hop over there and jump over the thing onto the mat still! She wouldn’t not let me do it!

Laura: she still made you do it even though you had a sprained ankle?Clare: she still made me do it, I was on crutches! She thought it was

funny!Sara: evil teachers!Chelsea: they are aren’t they

Hughes & Coakley (1991) ‘Positive deviance’ and ‘the sports ethic’

The Results of Previous Experiences:Symbolic Violence in Action

Caroline: I never did PE at school, I used to bring in a note or skip school and so did lots of my friends, we were the ones that ended up getting pregnant, you know I bet if you asked most young mums whether they did PE at school they would say no. Its just a personality type I think.

Karen: Yeah I definitely agree with that it’s the same with me

Creating Safe Spaces: Building Emotional Capital

Preventing Actual Physical Harm:• Reducing risk e.g. risk assessments, Sports as dangerous- (quotes from

young women) how was this managed in the project? Risk Assessments

Planning for Emotional Security:‘I never want us to have to pick teams!’(Carrie) ‘I want it to be all girls, I can’t do this in front of boys’(Karen) ‘I want it to be just us lot, you know cos we know each other, we know that we’re

all nervous and nobody is going to try to show off or make anyone else look stupid’(Mafunda),

‘I don’t want any male coaches or instructors’(Livvy)‘I’m not doing anything that I’ve done before because I know I’ve already failed

at that’ (Yetunde)

Generating Symbolic Capital

Normalizing Emotional Disclosure

Young Women as: • Project leaders• Budget holders• Employers of coaches

Challenging Symbolic Violence in Action

Attending to emotions = continued engagement • Young women decided their own level of participation• Opportunities to take supporting roles• Flexible to changes in situation and priorities

Coaches attempted to bypass the new power structureCoach 3: You’re not going to get anything out of this if you don’t put the effort inCoach 3: Come on we’re only here once a week so we don’t have time for rest

breaks

Coach 3: They don’t really seem to be in the mood for this today do theyLaura: Well isn’t it great that they came along and are joining in anyway?Coach 3: Oh… well yes absolutely

Young Women’s Recommendations

• We want fun and variety and not routine• We want to be with our friends• We don’t want to look stupid• We want flexibility in commitment levels• We want to choose our own projects• We need help to make our projects work

REFERENCES

• Bourdieu, P., (1984) ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste’, Routledge, London

• Bourdieu, P., (1985) ‘The Social Space and Genesis of Groups’ Theory and Society, Vol.14, No.6, pp.723-744

• Bourdieu, P., (1986) ‘The Forms of Capital’ in Richardson, J.G., (Ed) (1986) ‘Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education’ Greenwood Press

• Bourdieu, P., (2001) ‘Masculine Domination’ Polity Press, Cambridge

• Hughes, R. & Coakley, J. (1991) ‘Positive deviance among athletes: The implications of overconformity to the sports ethic’. Sociology of Sport Journal, 8(4), 307-25

• Khanlou, N. and Peter, E. (2005) ‘Participatory action research: considerations for ethical review’, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 60, pp.2233-2340

• McNiff, J., Lomax, P., & Whitehead, J., (2003) You and Your Action Research Project (2nd Edition), Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer

• Reay, D., Gendering Bourdieu’s concept of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class, in Adkins, L., & Skeggs, B., (2004) Feminism After Bourdieu Blackwell Publishing, Oxford

• Shilling, C., (1993) ‘The Body and Social Theory’ Sage, London

• Shiling, C., (1991) ‘Educating the Body: Physical Capital and the Production of Social Inequalities’ Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp.653-672

• Skeggs, B., (1997) ‘Formations of Class and Gender’ Sage, London

Thank you for listening

I would be most grateful for any feedback or questions

Laura GreenBath Spa University

[email protected]