Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography

This book offers a brief history of how autoethnography has been employed in studies of sport and physical (in)activity to date and makes an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches - challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the colonial assumptions at work in so many physical cultural and academic spaces. It presents examples of autoethnographic work that interrogate physical cultural practices as both produced by, and generative of, settler-colonial logics and structures, including research into outdoor recreation, youth sport experiences, and sport spectatorship. It situates this work in the context of key paradigmatic issues in social scientific research, including ontology, epistemology, axiology, ethics, and praxis, and looks ahead at the shape that social relations might take beyond settler colonialism. Drawing on cutting-edge research and presenting innovative theoretical perspectives, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in physical cultural studies, sport studies, outdoor studies, sociology, cultural studies, or qualitative research methods in the social sciences.

Jason Laurendeau is Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. His research interests include settler colonialism, gender, risk, childhood, research methodology generally, and autoethnography in particular.

Proem, 1. Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically: "The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren't the Easy Ones", 2. Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada: (Un)sett(l)ing the Stage, 3. Anti-Colonial Autoethnography, 4. Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Complicating Settler Mobility, 5. Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity: (Un)Becoming(?) Settlers, 6. O Canada? (Be)longing, (Un)certainty, and White Settler Inheritance, 7. (Autoethnographic) Futures: "Something as Yet Unimagined"