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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Keynote speech. Sociologies of sport and sociologies in sport. Challenges, difficulties and perspectives

Résumé

During the ESA 2017 Conference, in Athens, Dominic Malcolm, delivered his keynote by partly taking up one of his articles from 2014 and addressing the issue of the social construction of the sociology of sports. Simply put, his speech was about the fact that this social construction is conceived as a 'professional project' through which a knowledge domain, and this group's authoritative status, was established. According to Malcolm, sociologists of sport sought to validate their professional project through appeals to the sociological 'mainstream' and the correlative distancing from physical education. A few years later, after some significant crises as the covid-19 one, also illustrated in the recent papers published by some members of the RN 28, we can state that sociology of sports remains a still evolving branch of sociology, which tries to build an 'identity' by partly distancing itself from neighbouring (sub)disciplines without really coming to an epistemological break. Through this keynote, I do not presume to draw an evolutionary line of the sociology of sports, nor to adapt or take up Dominic Malcolm's discourse. I intend to illustrate a possible line of demarcation of the sociology of sports (and physical activities) that goes beyond the question of sociological paradigms, theoretical frameworks and sub-disciplinary nuances. In this speech I take up Michael Burawoy's call for a public sociology, which he proposed in 2004 as President of the American Sociological Association, and in which he illustrated four ideal ways of doing sociology: public sociology, policy sociology, professional sociology and critical sociology. Burawoy’s words were widely discussed in the United States, and the British Journal of Sociology devoted a special issue to them with the participation of influential British and American researchers. They are still partly debated today in France, and I believe it is still relevant to understand the postures and weltanshauungs of many of us. Starting from Burawoy’s works, I will illustrate that - simplifying - starting from these four postures it is possible today to identify two different sociologies related to the worlds of sports and physical activities: a sociology of sport and physical activity that is mostly critical and professional, more orthodox, and a sociology in sport and physical activity (mostly public and policy sociology), more open to interdisciplinary debates. In my view, these two sociologies now constitute the two main lines of evolution of the sociology of sport and physical activity. In the last part of the presentation, I will illustrate some examples of this bipartition, partly based on personal experience: on the one hand, a sociology in (or for) adapted physical activities, and on the other, a sociology of physical activity during the covid-19 crisis.

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Sociologie
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Dates et versions

hal-04528009 , version 1 (31-03-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04528009 , version 1

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Alessandro Porrovecchio. Keynote speech. Sociologies of sport and sociologies in sport. Challenges, difficulties and perspectives. ESA Research Network 28 Society and Sport Midterm Conference Sport and social responsibility: science and practice in times of crisis, Klara Kovacs; Alessandro Porrovecchio, Oct 2022, Debrecen, Hungary. ⟨hal-04528009⟩
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