Sport scientists in-becoming: from fulfilling one’s potential to finding our way along

ABSTRACT

It is common to encourage people to envision life as a process of fulfilling their potential. But what exactly does this mean? Traditionally, this question has been addressed by way of ‘complementarity’; dividing the human into biological and cultural components. Fulfilment is placed on the side of the cultural; an acquisition of encoded secondary information transmitted from predecessors that represents what it means ‘to know’. Potential has been defined from the biological, as a suite of innate capacities localised to the mind and body, passed on through a mechanism of genetic inheritance. Founded upon a metaphor of inter-generational transmission, this perspective leads to a conceptualisation of life as a progressive closure, ‘filling up’ the biologically innate with the culturally acquired. However, despite its prominence, this static view leads to a troubling question: with one’s potential fulfilled, where is one to go next? In this theoretical commentary, we offer an alternate, dynamical account of potential and fulfilment by leaning on Ingold’s notion of wayfaring. From this perspective, life is not a process of being ‘filled up’ with secondary information, but of responsively ‘opening up’; corresponding with varied experiences cast forward by others, as they to ours, situated within a continually unfolding field of relations. Ontologically, this view is of ‘us’, not as beings, but becomings, finding our way along generative paths inhabited alongside others. Knowledge is not transmitted inter-generationally, but is grown by primarily experiencing the coming-into-being of things we enter into correspondence with. Initiated through a prologue, these ideas are exemplified in sharing our storied journey as sport scientists in-becoming, following not objects of convention, but corresponding with things of curiosity.

KEYWORDS:

• Correspondence
• becoming
• knowing
• skill
• information
• wayfinding
• transdisciplinarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Ingold (2011, ch. 12) for a detailed account of places as knots.

2 Our phrasing here can be traced to Gibson’s (1979/2015) ecological approach to way-finding. ‘An observer who is getting around in the course of daily life’, Gibson (1979/2015, p. 188, emphasis in original) argued, ‘sees from what I will call a path of observation’. This ‘can be thought of as a unitary movement, an excursion, a trip, a voyage that can last over short (minutes, hours) or long (days, weeks, years) periods’ (Gibson 1979/2015, paraphrased).

3 In the chapter The Culture of Acquisition and the Practice of Understanding, Jean Lave (1990) refers to this as ‘understanding in practice’. Knowing, according to this perspective, occurs ‘in situations whose specific characteristics are part of the practice as it unfolds’ (p. 19).

4 This is especially noted in research that ascribes the label of ‘talent’ to youth sports participants based on deterministic models of ‘identification’ and ‘development’. See Ribeiro et al. (2021) for a detailed overview of such criticisms.

5 For a detailed overview of participant observation as a way of knowing in sport science, see Woods and Davids (2022).

6 For a detailed recount of McClintock’s seminal work and approach to inquiry, see Henry (1997).

7 We have drawn inspiration for this section from the opening chapter of Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, written by Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (2007). While these authors situate ‘improvisation’ beneath similar principles, to us, they equally relate to wayfaring given their ecological grounding.

8 See Gibson (1979/2015) and Ingold (2000).

9 See Ingold (2014, p. 390) for a critique detailing the pitfalls of an ‘interconnected world’.