Pedagogies of (de)liberation: salvation and social inclusion by means of Midnight Football

Abstract

In this article, we explore the pedagogies of (de)liberation promoted in the sports-based intervention Midnight Football (MF), carried out in a suburban and socio-economically disadvantaged residential area in Sweden. Based on interviews with coaches and managers and on-site observations, we examine how socio-pedagogical rationalities and technologies are articulated in discourse and assumed to operate within the intervention, and how certain ideals of conduct and social inclusion are represented in discourse. The analysis is guided by a Foucauldian perspective on a variety of forms of power. It displays how disciplinary forms of spatial and temporal diversion and dislocation of youth from sites of risk and danger to sites of order and football are formed within MF, where non-authoritative relations between coaches and youth can be facilitated, underpinned by a pastoral form of benign care and guidance. This, in turn, according to the rationality, enables pedagogies of sublime guidance and governing through deliberative and motivational dialogues, supporting youth to conduct themselves and, within the frames of football, choose the right track in life, away from gangs and crime. Making active and responsible choices means not only opportunities for individual deliberation, salvation and social inclusion, but moreover, security in and for the locality, community and society. The analysis illustrates how discipline, pastoral power and technologies of empowerment and of the self are intertwined and constitutive of the government promoted. Notably, dialogues between coaches and participants do not focus on the socio-economic inequalities or the socio-political context of segregation among the youth; instead, salvation becomes a question of the mindset of the youth, legitimizing a pre-given socio-economic and socio-political order of social exclusion. Still, there is unfulfilled potential for critical pedagogy and (de)liberative dialogues for articulating the conditions for participation in sport and in society on the terms of the participating youth.