Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners increasingly pay attention to sport and physical activity as a means and context for refugee wellbeing and integration, influenced by wider political and policy concerns about forced migration. Considering this growing scholarly and policy attention, it is timely to take stock of, and critically reflect on, recent developments in this field of research. This paper offers an integrative, critical review of the scientific literature on the topic. It critically synthesizes what is known about the sport and physical activity experiences of people with refugee and forced migrant backgrounds, and identifies key issues and directions for future research in this field. This review of contemporary academic literature comprises 83 publications derived from fourteen languages published between 1996 and 2019. It shows a substantial increase in the volume of published research on the topic in recent years (2017-2019). Published research is concentrated primarily in Western countries around the themes of health promotion, integration and social inclusion, and barriers and facilitators to participation in sport and physical activity. The findings foreground the use of policy categories, deficit approaches, and intersectionalities as three pressing challenges in this area of research. Based on this synthesis, the authors identify four research gaps that require attention in future research: the experiential (embodied emotional) dimensions of sport and physical activity, the need to decolonize research, the space for innovative methodologies, and research ethics.

This paper uses the concept of aesthetic formation to examine the practices through which diasporic imaginations become tangible and experienced as 'real'. The authors interpret sport as an embodied aesthetic practice through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for identification and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on a transnational community-based sports event, the Amsterdam Futsal Tournament, the paper discusses how articulations of Somali diasporism become tangible and embodied in subjects who participate in this event. The authors conclude that these materialisation practices can simultaneously elicit multiple forms and levels of belonging that also foster a sense of integration and belonging to the nation. ARTICLE HISTORY

The empirical focus of this article is a sport-based settlement service targeting newly arrived migrants in Melbourne, Australia. This five-month study examines staff members’ everyday work routines with a focus on their participation in meetings and the production of documents. Embedded in the Australian immigration policy context, this article shows how staff members aim to empower clients while simultaneously falling back into stigmatising refugee/client identification through administrative practices. The results indicate that staffs’ everyday client constructions reinforce the othering and categorisation of ethnic minorities and support a reductionist deficit model of presenting clients. This may limit the opportunities for migrants to identify with and participate in wider Australian society and thus has the opposite effect of what governments and the sector aim to accomplish.

No abstract

This paper explores how multiculturalism is enacted and negotiated among Brazilian and Portuguese migrants at a football (soccer) club in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The authors use the lens of everyday multiculturalism to analyse the tension between public expectations about intercultural 'mixing' and actual intercultural engagement in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss how club members negotiate the national discourse that recognises cultural differences yet prescribes intercultural mixing in the public sphere. The findings show that meeting co-ethnics is one of the club members' primary motivations for participating in the football club, whereas interacting with people with culturally diverse backgrounds is not a leitmotif. Everyday group-making practices among Portuguese and Brazilian players reinforce group boundaries and constrain intercultural interaction, thereby challenging normative multiculturalism that prescribes ethnic mixing. The paper concludes that members' multicultural presentation of their club provides a socially accepted environment for ethnically concentrated sport participation.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract