I wonder in what ways we can reimagine belonging in sport for South Asian and Muslim heritage communities in the UK if we take a decolonising approach to sports research methodologies?

Speaker(s):

Pamela Jabbar ,

Abstract:

Reimagining invites us to revisit the master's tools and their complicity in maintaining the master's house (Lorde 1983). Rather than dismantle and discard Western ideas and techniques, this talk is an invitation to imagine new tools, new houses, and new ways of knowing (Mignolo and Walsh 2018); to repurpose existing tools, develop new methods that hold the spirit of decolonising values and position new ways of knowing within non-hierarchical systems of knowledge production (Spivak, 1988, Smith, 2022). The turn to non-extractive, non-exploitative, storytelling and story-catching, and not data-snatching research methods is an act of resistance. Calling us to resist dominant ways of knowing and knowledge production, and embrace “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2009). Decolonising methodologies promise collective knowledge co-creation, shifting power relations that decentre the researcher and privilege the knowledge-holder. However, translating and operationalising decolonial principles into concrete research methods remains difficult due to a lack of practical protocols. In this research methods rendezvous (RMR) I seek collaborations to co-design context-specific, participatory practices that foreground multi-voiced, collectively situated knowledge creation. I take the specific example of sport to work through an idea of “subaltern hauntology” (as collectively unheard hauntings of lost futures). Specifically, I ask: a) How do the spectres of Empire, colonial histories, and the colonial matrix of power persist and (re)surface as “ghosts” of lost futures in subaltern sporting experiences? b) How might decolonising approaches offer new reinterpretations of “exclusion” as resistance and agentic mechanisms of belonging for South Asian and Muslim heritage communities in the UK?