‘Do know harm’: Examining the intersecting capabilities of young people from refugee backgrounds through community sport and leisure programmes

Abstract

Young people from refugee backgrounds have been repeatedly denied the ability to lead a life that they value. Community sport and leisure has been positioned as a tool to foster positive wellbeing experiences for these young people living in Western resettlement countries. Drawing on qualitative data from a Participatory Action Research project in London, England, we apply Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach to examine how the young people made sense of and negotiated their interconnecting capabilities through the sport and leisure programme. We examine three key interconnections between the capabilities of (a) life, bodily health and play; (b) affiliation and emotion and (c) bodily integrity and control over the environment. The findings are significant in ensuring sport and leisure provides opportunities for young people from refugee backgrounds to engage in positive wellbeing experiences and for enabling them and those supporting them to know and challenge harmful practices that may restrict capabilities.

Spaces of football and belonging for people seeking asylum: Resisting policy-imposed liminality in Italy

“…To help ensure anonymity and confidentiality, participants’ names have been replaced by pseudonyms and details that would risk making them recognisable have been slightly modified. The research engaged with approaches that go beyond the standardised practices of procedural ethics (MacKenzie et al, 2007; Smith et al, 2023). As a White Italian male researcher, I was aware of the risk of reproducing the exploitative relations that participants experienced in their day-to-day lives.…”

“…Although this study did not employ the Participatory Action Research framework that has been used in recent works on sport and forced migration studies (Smith et al, 2023; Stone, 2018), the methodological decisions outlined above contributed to creating more equitable relations. Yet, my position of privilege in terms of language, race, gender, legal status and class, still involve an inextricable differential of power between me and the participants.…”