Abstract

The actors of practices like skateboarding, BMX, in-line skating, parkour, cross-golfing or urban climbing have left spatially fenced, institutionalised facilities of sport, transcend their traditional programs of movement and move their bodies with new gestures, rituals and forms of representation in public urban spaces. Well-worn subject forms such as those in institutions, e.g. schools or sports clubs, do not yet exist within these scopes of informal sport. These new sportive cultures are insofar a particular sphere, as subjects and spaces are in a continuous flow. The practices provide an experimental ground, on which new ways of self-making can be tested practically and – at the same time – a ground, on which possible courses of action within urban spaces can be fathomed, extended and recoded. By participating in a dynamic interplay of bodies, space and artefacts, the individual merges into a yet evolving form, whose individual or social meaning cannot be solely deduced theoretically nor captured just by its medial representation, but only through empirical research into observable and experienceable practices. With these urban sportive practices, processes of subjectivation emerge, in which 'the city' or 'the urban space' becomes an important element of the individual self and his world. The project's goal is, to provide praxeologically oriented empirical insights into an urban sports culture as a subject culture and, hence, at the same time contribute to developing a praxeological analytic of subjectivation.

The empirical object is fixed-gear-cycling, which is centred around individual and collective (sometimes organised as competitions) means of locomotion with track- or fixed-gear-bikes ('fixies') in the city. In contrast to other post-traditional sports, fixed-gear-cycling decidedly joins into a broader complex of practices, i.e. the urban traffic(-space). The puristic bicycle without gears, freewheeling or conventional brakes provokes a quick and 'pragmatic', i.e. fluid movement in the interspaces and gaps of traffic; a seemingly 'stubborn' dealing with the momentum of a body-bicycle-unit amidst urban traffic, which is often perceived as risky or deviant. A further peculiarity is the phenomenon's fuzziness: the actors do not integrate or identify themselves exclusively via the usage of a fixie, but (also) via a certain style of riding and living, which is related to bike-messenger culture, traditional cycling-sport and the bicycle in a more general sense – which, then again, becomes particularly palpable through the fixie.

Against this background, my central questions are: How do what kinds of 'bearers', 'participants' or 'elements' become regularly connected with each other, so that we can talk about a certain practice or subject culture in the first place? How does the individual become a competent and recognizable participant of the practice and what characterises this process as a (specific) process of subjectivation? What are this practice's relationships to the social context and the subject forms existing there?

mehr...

• Sport – Space – City – Urbanity (including the hyphens)
• Subjectivation in/through sports
• Qualitative Research on Movement and Space