Parkour’s interactional organization. The paradoxes of media representations and how traceurs cope through non-representational strategies

Abstract

Parkour is a recent type of sport where the body appears to produce moving sequences along urban spaces. Now, however smooth these sequences might seem, our perception of them entails media representations of the sport already. These actually generate certain uneasiness in practitioners themselves, who see them more like stagings than accurate depictions. Still, media representations are paramount to understand the social organization of parkour. What ensues is thus a paradox on parkour’s media uses, which on a closer examination uncovers the role of non-representational strategies that contribute to organize the activity. Some non-representational forms may be read or discerned through media traces, while other non-representational strategies may function as contextual common ground. Developing emergent categories out of a grounded theory approach,this article examines how both representational and non-representational elements interact together, underlining the unique capacity of a urban experience to set an distinctive organization.