Football for Inclusion : Examining the Pedagogic Rationalities and the Technologies of Solidarity of a Sports-based Intervention in Sweden

Sports practices have been emphasised in social policy as a means of responding to social problems. In this article weanalyse a sports-based social intervention performed in a “socially vulnerable” area in Sweden. We examine the forma-tion of includable citizens in this project, based on interviews with representatives involved in the project. The materialis analysed from a governmentality perspective, focusing on how problems and solutions are constructed as being consti-tutive of each other. The focus of the analysis is on social solidarity and inclusion as contemporary challenges, and howsport, specifically football, is highlighted as a way of creating social solidarity through a pedagogic rationality—football asa means of fostering citizens according to specific ideals of solidarity and inclusion. The formation of solidarity appearsnot as a mutual process whereby an integrated social collective is created, but rather as a process whereby those affectedby exclusion are given the opportunity to individually adapt to a set of Swedish norms, and to linguistic and cultural skills,as a means of reaching the “inside”. Inclusion seems to be possible as long as the “excluded” adapt to the “inside”, whichis made possible by the sports-based pedagogy. In conclusion, social problems and social tensions are spatially locatedin “the Area” of “the City”, whose social policy, of which this sports-based intervention is a part, maintains rather thanreforms the social order that creates these very tensions