A valuable player in breaking down boundaries
When London won the bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, one of its key strengths was the Capital’s multicultural make-up and its promise to take Olympism to the children of the world. But does sport really have the power to bridge the gap between religion and culture and aid social integration? Amanda Overend speaks to Dr Mahfoud Amara and Professor Ian Henry from the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences.
Since 2004, colleagues in the University’s Institute of Leisure Policy and Centre for Olympic Studies and Research have been engaged in international research to determine the role of sport in social integration and the promotion of interculturalism.
During that time Dr Mahfoud Amara and Professor Ian Henry – a pairing that is as ethnically and religiously diverse as the subjects they study – have helped establish Loughborough as a leader in international sports policy and research on intercultural engagement through sport.
Their work was kick started by a half million Euro project funded by the European Commission entitled ‘The use of sport in multicultural dialogue’. Along with colleague Dawn Aquilina and local partner organisations they conducted research across 25 member states.
This was soon followed by another European Commission study, this time focusing on sport and the social inclusion and education of refugees and asylum seekers as part of the organisation’s Year of Education through Sport, in which case studies in the East Midlands, Glasgow and South Wales were evaluated.
Since London was awarded the 2012 Olympic Games, focus has turned to the largest multi-sports event on earth and recent commissions have included evaluation of the 2012 International Inspirations programme, which uses sport to aid community development and education. Amara and Henry have teamed up with colleagues in the School’s Institute of Youth Sport and Stirling University to gauge the impact of the programme in the first five countries – Azerbaijan, Brazil, Malay, India and Zambia.
Closer to home Amara’s Sport, Muslim Identities and Cultures in the UK British Academy project, inspired by the Olympics and part of a wider research programme aimed at exploring the links between ethno-religious groups, ways of life and Western sport, sought out case studies in Leicester and Birmingham with a view to developing methods and approaches to be employed in East London ahead of the 2012 Games.
When we were doing the Europe-wide research on sport and multiculturalism one of the recurring factors was the issue of Muslim communities and Muslim populations,” explained Amara. “It was even represented as an issue around the integration of migrant populations into European societies.
“That’s what triggered research looking specifically at Britain to find out how Muslim organisations are making sense of sporting practice and how they use it in their activities, and to determine how policy makers, Government agencies and sporting organisations are responding to the specific needs of Muslim organisations.”
A common theme that runs across the research is the need to see the programmes two ways to understand how the end users experience the sporting interventions as much as what the policy makers’ perceptions are and what they’re trying to achieve.
“In the top down approach we identify the different types of policies that have been adopted which allows us to make comparisons between countries and communities,” said Henry. “We found that although people use the same terminology about social integration they could have almost polar opposite approaches.
“For example, the policy of funding teams or leagues for a distinct ethnic group could be seen as success by some if they’re enhancing participation by an under-represented group, while another set of policy makers might see it as failure because they’re not aiding social integration.
We’ve been engaging with policy makers to clarify their thinking and look at the consequences of their approaches then looking from the bottom up to gain an understanding of how participants at grass roots level actually experience these things, find out what they value and what approaches they think are working.
“That’s the approach we adopted in the Birmingham and Leicester study. We looked at the policies in the two cities, the national policy approaches that cover them and then asked what are the desires and priorities of the local populations. Did they vary across different groups and was it possible to generalise about Muslim populations?”
Amara and Henry have interviewed dozens of policy makers and uncovered a multitude of interventions and admit that whilst sport has an important role to play it also has its limitations.
“There is a wide belief that sport can transcend cultural, political and national differences, but the danger is that you exaggerate the problems sport can resolve,” said Amara.
“Some people think that by organising a football game or basketball game between two communities or by giving some money to organise a sporting activity this will reduce problems of crime or exclusion.
“We are dealing with complex issues by looking at sport and culture and discussing it alongside inclusion, community cohesion, national identity and citizenship. Our role as academics is to highlight those complexities and give voices to different stakeholders and then it’s for the policy makers to translate the research and make it part of their thinking for using sport as a means for social integration and social cohesion.”
“There’s no one size fits all or a universal key to achieving these goals,” added Henry. “There’s a whole range of organisations who are looking at the uses of sport. Some may be making claims that are perhaps idealistic and a little naïve but others are trying to invest resource in finding out what really does work and that’s the area of our research.”
Good examples that have produced positive benefits include a Bosnia and Herzegovina basketball team in Derby. The group for example translated their team name into English in order to stress they were engaging with the host community rather than differentiating themselves from them.
There was a similar story in Cardiff where a football team of asylum seekers joined a local competitive league to demonstrate they could respect the rules of the competitive league and therefore, by implication, they were more likely to respect the rules of the host society.
“The Bosnian basketball players talked about how basketball helped them define their new identity as British but from a Bosnian origin and how it was easier for them to play basketball with Serbians or Croatians here in Britain than in their home country,” explained Amara.
“The asylum seeker football team in Cardiff explained how being accepted as part of the local league was important for them, and by socialising with the opposition players after the games it gave them a direct contact with the local population and a chance for the locals to get to know them and gain knowledge of their background and why they came to Britain.
It was an opportunity for them to talk about their suffering and that they were forced to migrate to Britain, it wasn’t only for financial gain. And it was football that helped them establish this dialogue.
In Leicester groups such as the Federation of Muslim Organisations (FMO) facilitate inter-faith games between imams and Christian clerics, while the Khidmah Organisation uses sport to help the local Muslim community address the lack of social, educational and recreational activities through a range of events which include the popular men and women-only sport fundays.
“Thanks to the fundays Muslim groups in Leicester have established networks with local businesses and local government agencies including education and social services they might otherwise struggle to access on such a large scale,” Amara explained.
Another key point for Amara was that sport enables people to talk candidly about their problems and experiences. He found by speaking to people within a sporting context they found it easier to discuss complex and sensitive issues. And there are other interesting anecdotes, as Henry explains;
For groups like asylum seekers who are trying to find their feet in new and difficult locations we’d thought their situation was so precarious that they wouldn’t really value sport, it would be seen as a luxury.
“But a Congolese asylum seeker we interviewed talked about the stresses he went through throughout the week and how Sunday was the only day he looked forward to. I think he said it was the only time he smiled, and that was because he could forget the stress of having no income and having no resources and he could just abandon himself in playing.”
The wealth of knowledge gained by Amara and Henry demonstrates how, if used correctly, sport can be an important tool in the pursuit of social cohesion. But there is no single solution and sport must always be used as part of a wider set of initiatives for the programme to be a success.
“We’ve seen an increased awareness of the role of sport as we move further through our research,” reflected Henry. “Policy makers are better understanding the lessons and are becoming more sophisticated in how they use sport to achieve their goals and we like to think our analysis has gone some way to helping achieve that.”
Want to know more?
- Websites: Centre for Olympic Studies and Research, Institute of Sport and Leisure Policy
- Contact: Professor Ian Henry (I.P.Henry@lboro.ac.uk) and Dr Mahfoud Amara (M.Amara@lboro.ac.uk)
Download this issue in Adobe PDF format