Sustainable inclusion without sustainability

Abstract

In this PhD project, I put forward the importance of becoming more comfortable with the oscillating nature of wisdom in physical education, sport, and research. This is also what the word `without´ in the title `sustainable inclusion without sustainability´ implies. To open our activities for more knowledges than our own, to face interruptions, and to work on the edge of our knowledges in sustainable inclusive events. Thinking with Deleuze and a ten-second swimming event where Amira learns to float, I challenge the understanding of human being that often informs inclusive work in physical education, sports, and research. Namely, the Cartesian idea of the knowing subject. Within this approach, much research describes inclusive processes as various invitations to predetermined activities. The focus is on the excluded and their rights to participate, and to facilitate physical education, sports, and research so that people can participate. While offering some easily accessible methodological designs, they also provide us with a perspective of absence and that these activities are supposed to add health, wellbeing, knowledge, and credibility to peoples´ lives. And, this is good. What I suggest, however, is that such activities based on grand narratives and dogmas can just as easily exclude, and that sustainable inclusive activities may be dependent on the opposite, i.e., the possibility of not knowing what people need to be healthy, knowledgeable, and credible. In tune, the aim of this project is to shed light on other ways of understanding, relating to and creating inclusive processes. Including a process-ontology, this project suggests that the task of physical education, sports, and research is to create the future without falling into the trap of doing this in isolation. As I see it, we cannot escape collective creations of the future. We cannot evade those for whom our activities are a matter of concern. Experimenting on, and speculating about, what this immanent approach may do to qualitative case studies, research interests, ethics, qualities, educational organization, curricula, professionalism, and much more, I provide theoretical extensions that may be important to think with if we are serious about reaching more inclusive physical educations, sports, and research. I guess, non-sustainability is the other of sustainable inclusion, without which sustainable inclusion would not be what it is?