The Everyday Breakaway: Participant Perspectives of Everyday Life Within a Sport for Development and Peace Program
Keywords: Africa
Empowerment
Ethnography
Participatory Methods
Physical Cultural Studies
Sport for Development and Peace

Abstract This dissertation considers the precarity and politics of the everyday lives of sport for development participants within a post-genocide Rwanda. Pushing beyond sport for development research that has traditionally centered on organizations, policies, and approaches, this study is grounded within its participants’ lived experiences. Extracting from ethnographic field research in rural Rwanda, this dissertation’s process-oriented sociological inquiry seeks to invert such hegemonic positions, by taking “recipients” from passive objectivity as beneficiaries of development, to “active” agents in their every day lives. This dissertation presents the dramatic processual complexities of ‘choice,’ or lack of choice, for participants in a sport for development program. By using their bodies, cyclists from within this particular program choose to subject themselves to the structures, ambitions, and processes of those in power, uncertain if such aims align with personal aspirations. This dissertation, then, contributes to an understanding of this exploration of ‘choice’ from within a development organization. Such reflexive methodological inquiry highlights the ways in which the cyclists are active agents of their own life narratives, disrupting the tightly bounded meta-narratives of a post-conflict nation and a development organization working from within it. This dissertation reveals the power relations that structure the lives of many ordinary Rwandans and, in particular, my participants. By providing space for cyclists to resist, rich cultural and historical understandings of the underpinning mechanisms influencing their identities, processes, and actions are uncovered. Such agency does not negate the hegemonic system exclusively bound to my participants, but rather acknowledges the tangled-up power hierarchies and grand narratives structural forms of inequality ultimately produce. This dissertation focuses on the agency created, employed, and exploited by these cyclists in their everyday life, and contests sport for development as a means of social development by asking the question: does sport really matter? From the tea-laden fields of the mountainous northwest to the rolling roads of the southeast, this dissertation reveals the inconsistencies between grand narratives and those of the participants, as well as the mechanisms of resistance developed and implemented by the cyclists themselves. As a result, this study exposes the bicycle not as a symbol of freedom but as a tactical tool used by the cyclists. This is an ethnography about how people use certain mechanisms in particular contexts to make do, and how meaning is given to those mechanisms through how those people identify themselves in relation to such tangled spaces. On the African continent broadly, and in Rwanda in particular, identity is complicated, fragmented, and formed through multiple webs of interaction and meaning. Sometimes these conflict and disrupt. The disruption is not neat, but messy, complex, and contextual.