Running for inclusion: responsibility, (un)deservingness and the spectacle of integration in a sport-for-refugees intervention in Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract

This study contributes to critical inter-disciplinary analyses of the meanings, uses and implications of sport-for-integration initiatives in relation to the contemporary politics of asylum in the Global North. It will do so, by drawing on an ethnographic study addressing the activities of FLAG21, a sport project based in Geneva, Switzerland, that employs running as an instrument of integration and health promotion for migrants and refugees. In advancing this discussion, we put to dialogue Nicholas De Genova's work on the 'border spectacle' (2013) with critical analyses of integration in (forced) migration studies to explore what we call the 'integration spectacle' . Through this lens, we address FLAG21 activities to examine the scenes of inclusion and the obscene of exclusion that sports projects aiming to foster refugees' social integration can at the same time make visible and unwittingly conceal through their interventions. The discussion illuminates the ambivalent positions that sports interventions occupy within the politics and moral representations of asylum. This, as a premise to imagine, co-create and support sport and leisure practices and contexts that are more closely attending to and engaging with refugees' experiences, struggles and trajectories within and beyond contemporary regimes of asylum.

It’s Just About Having Fun’? Interrogating the lived experiences of newcomers To Canada in introductory winter sport programmes

“…I argue that the limited ways participants framed their WNP engagement around racial identity further illustrates the assimilative nature of how winter sport programming for newcomers generally operates in Canada; that is, favouring individual newcomer responsibility over their own integration instead of addressing long-standing structural and systemic discrimination that fosters racial indifference. Sport-related integration scholars exploring different sport and geographic contexts have made similar points in terms of how newcomer sport programmes can reproduce flawed, problematic assumptions of newcomers (Kataria and De Martini Ugolotti, 2022; Spaaij et al, 2019).…”

“…Agergaard's (2018) reconceptualization of sport-related integration offered appropriate theoretical grounding to interrogate the participants’ WNP experiences from social relational and multidimensional perspectives. Moreover, extant newcomer sport-related integration scholarship (Dowling, 2020; Kataria and De Martini Ugolotti, 2022; Nunn et al, 2022; Schinkel, 2018; Spaaij et al, 2019) was put into conversation with Agergaard's (2018) reconceptualization to investigate the tensions and dilemmas throughout the WNP.…”

“…Additional scholars have critiqued integration's prominence as a policy tool and ideology through examining its assimilationist, unidirectional view of newcomer settlement (Dowling, 2020); problematizing deficit-based understandings of newcomers as passive programme recipients (Spaaij et al, 2019); challenging the norm of integration as an individual newcomer responsibility (Schinkel, 2018); and ignoring the complexity of newcomers’ transnational lives, especially before arriving in their new home (Nunn et al, 2022). Kataria and De Martini Ugolotti (2022) argued how newcomer sport programmes reproduce and challenge prevailing assumptions, narratives, and practices about newcomer lives and trajectories, thereby illustrating the complexity of studying sport-related integration. I put these critical discussions of sport-related integration into dialogue with Agergaard's (2018) reconceptualization to sharpen my focus on how integration was operationalized and experienced within the WNP, and examined extant programme tensions and dilemmas.…”