Cultivating Bodies, Discipline and Pleasures: An Institutional Ethnography of a Sports School

Despite the proliferation of sports schools across Canada, very little attention has been paid to them within Canadian education systems. Starting from this premise, and given the relatively little academic attention directed toward understanding the sports school in sociological, educational and cultural terms, my dissertation set out to critically explore the historical development and social meaning of sport and recreation in a Canadian sports school. Engaging in a detailed institutional ethnography, I specifically examined how the space, everyday lives and experiences of student-athletes and staff in a sports school are an effect of a matrix of discourses—institutional discourses (e.g., Sport Canada policy statements, institutional documents) bodily discourses (e.g., management of the body through disciplinary technologies) as well as normalization of injury discourses (e.g., injury as a pain-reward complex), to name a few. I argue that the (re)production of disciplinary technologies, framed by discourses of excellence, enabled the manifestation of desire as a productive force. I demonstrate that while the culture of the sports school involves living within disciplinary apparatuses—apparatuses that may in fact limit the body’s potentiality—paradoxically, living within these disciplinary technologies and networks of pouvoir, can open youth up to the potential (puissance) for a range of embodied pleasures, even if this potential is quickly harnessed by the forces of pouvoir (Pronger, 2002). What my research illustrates is that living within such spaces of discipline and pleasure becomes a way of enacting discourse and practices that athletes (and adults) choose to apply to themselves and their daily lives. While desire and pleasure can be organized through adultist cultures of excellence and performance, what my findings make clear is that young people are legitimate participants in creating the cultures of their classrooms and sportscapes and can be agents in how they experience and embody desire and pleasures in their lives.Ph.D