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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents learnings from initiatives using games, sports, and play for community-led development. It aims to draw out these methods’ distinctive contributions compared to arts-based and audio-visual tools, more commonly featured in the participatory research literature.

Paper long abstract:

While critical literature has explored the successes, challenges, and ethical dimensions of participatory approaches, often focusing on visual and arts-based methods such as theatre, photography, mapping, storytelling or performance (Coemans & Hannes, 2017), games, sports, and play as tools for community-led research have been largely under-researched in development studies.

This paper focuses on the potential of participatory games-based methods for emancipatory development, particularly in times of crisis that demand reimagining alternative futures. Although they have received limited scholarly attention, games and play-based methods are used extensively in community initiatives and development interventions. Many global development institutions promote sport as a tool for addressing a range of development and climate goals (Gadais, 2019), sometimes criticized for being co-opted as an instrument for the governmentality of donor-driven agendas (Burnett 2015). Yet, sports and games are also widely used in neighbourhood initiatives and grassroots movements of community resistance, for subversive, emancipatory, and decolonial intentions along the lines conceptualized by participatory action research thinkers such as Freire or Fals Borda.

Amidst these debates and multiple uses, the paper explores sport and play as a form of action research, their methodological specificities and the circumstances where these techniques can contribute to contesting dominant epistemologies, navigating uncertainty, and envisioning new pathways for social change. Themes include how sports and games may redefine forms of engagement and interactions, present new opportunities for co-creation and critical pedagogies, open distinctive entry points for empowerment - engaging the body and voice through play - and inspiring collective action and coalition-building.