Leaders building relationships with young refugees during a sport project

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to examine how social work students (SWs) attempted to enact social work principles to engage in relationship building with young refugees during a Sport for Development project. The project, 'U on Board' was built on the assumption that pleasure and enjoyment in physical activity could contribute to the wellbeing of participants. The project took place at a refugee centre in a Dutch midsized city. We drew on Foucauldian notions of pastoral power and dressage to analyze how SWs applied social work principles to engage in relationship building with participating refugees. The Foucauldian based analysis revealed the SWs built positive relationships with the refugees by applying principles they had learned in their social work education through the disciplining power of dressage and of pastoral power.Recent reviews of Sport for Development (SfD) research and sport and forced migration studies found that most of the scholarly attention has focused on the objectives and content of such programs with few if any, focusing specifically on the congruency between the objectives of the program and the skill set of those who offer or lead the sport activities 1 (Schulenkorf, Sherry, and Rowe 2016;Spaaij et al. 2019). Based on their review and critique of core pedagogical strategies used in SfD initiatives, Spaaij and Jeanes (2013) suggested that establishing and maintaining positive relationships between those offering a project (leaders) and those young people for whom the project is earmarked should be a primary goal of such programs. Scholarly explorations of skills that may enable leaders/workers to engage in relationship building in SfD projects have however, received relatively little scholarly attention. [End note: In this paper, we refer to those working with participants in these programs as leaders.]Although those who work in SfD projects may possess the physical expertise to transmit sport skills to participants, leaders may overlook the needs of participants in SfD projects or focus on objectives such as working towards sport club membership and developing competitive sport skills (e.g. Waardenburg et al. 2019). Sport professionals are educated to teach sport skills but may not have the necessary expertise in working with youth such as young refugees. In contrast, relationship building is a core objective of social work and its