The Construction and Understanding of Mixed-Race Identities at a Superdiverse Youth Football Club: Hybridity, Confusion and Contra-fusion

Rosbrook-Thompson, James (2021) The Construction and Understanding of Mixed-Race Identities at a Superdiverse Youth Football Club: Hybridity, Confusion and Contra-fusion. Sociological Review, 69 (2). pp. 365-381. ISSN 1467-954X

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Abstract

Using the findings of two years’ ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines the construction and understanding of mixed-race identities at a football club situated in a superdiverse area of London. It describes how the characteristics of superdiversity together with the dynamic between parents/guardians, children, coaches and scouts shape people’s perceptions of the ethnic options available to mixed-race young people. I try to show how assertions relating to these ethnic options are consistent with understandings of hybridity. More specifically, there is a tension between fusion and preservation and in some instances a slippage between discourses of biology and culture. This reflects confusion about mixedness and leads to what I have called ‘contra-fusion’: a way of reasoning that resists the formation of integrated mixed identities by emphasising the preservation of raced and gendered inheritances in the constitution of mixedness.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Keywords:	ethnography, hybridity, identity, mixed race, race, sport, superdiversity
Faculty:	Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
Depositing User:	James Rosbrook-Thompson
Date Deposited:	05 May 2020 13:27
Last Modified:	05 Feb 2021 09:44
URI:	https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/705483

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