Ted Alexander - POST-DOCTORAL STIPEND 2007
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Policy analyses have identified the need for safe environments where social networks, autonomy, and control can be developed by youth (Donnelly & Coakley, 2002) and for “inclusive public spaces for leisure and activities that allow the expression of difference” (Papillon, 2002, p. 5). While it is not disputed that spaces may be a key element of providing social inclusion through sport, postwar sporting spaces have also been critiqued for the ways they restrict and control some while valorizing others (Vertinsky & McKay, 2004). Research has also drawn the link between urban forms and public health, implicating city planners in current health crises in North America (Frank, Engelke, & Schmid, 2003). Development of cities and the (re)drawing
of political boundaries of governance are reported to have particularly constricting outcomes for how public spaces are controlled and homogenized vis-à-vis citizens from lower socio-economic positions (Harvey, 2001; Mitchell, 2003). This is of specific concern in the Canadian context where urban and rural communities are being consolidated into regional governance systems as a method of achieving financial efficiencies (Kushner & Siegel, 2005; Siegel, 2004). In contrast, research investigating the lives of urban youth has uncovered agency in the ways they modify the planned order and the way “local neighbourhoods were actually the arena and also the basis of multi-ethnic harmony” (Watt & Stenson, 1998, p. 254). My postdoctoral research program examines how rural, suburban and urban spaces are constructed by institutions, staff and youth.
The research pursues the following questions:
- How is space implicated in sport inclusion policies and interpreted by municipal staff, and intended beneficiaries (e.g., diverse youth on low-income)?
- How are spaces of sport inclusion defined (including their location, format, level
of participant autonomy)?
- How are diverse youth living in low-income experiencing (or not experiencing) spaces
of sport inclusion?
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