Youth and social work - Critical reflections on youth, social work and sports-based interventions

The chapter provides a critical outlook on how power is constitutive of sports-based interventions, mobilised when sport is used as an instrument for youth and social work. Based on an examination of Midnight football, approached from a Foucauldian conceptualisation of power, we examine the work of power operating through sports-based interventions. We analyse the order of the intervention and its disciplinary machinery producing certain relations and conducts. We spotlight the role of coaches and leaders acting as role-models, embodying and prescribing certain forms of conduct. We investigate how the community between coaches and participants enables pastoral guidance. This analysis reveals how power works in relations between the disciplinary machine, activities of coaches and self-reflection of participants. The chapter raises the concern of how power can be critically scrutinised with respect to the provision of sports-based interventions, by examining power as a productive force taking shape in sports-based work with young people.