The field, the players, the ball that rolls: the becoming of a youth football match

While many studies have focused on coordination and perception in fluid team sport, I aim in this presentation to contribute with insights from an ethnomethodology-inspired approach to real-world video recordings of youths playing football matches. Ethnomethodologically informed ethnographies of sport have typically studied the role of coaching (Corsby et al., 2024), demonstrations (Evans & Reynolds, 2016) or embodied instructions (Evans & Lindwall, 2020). I focus in this presentation on the question of the relationship between the ball, the field and the players as actual occasions (Whitehead, 1979). The ball is a quasi-object, as Serres tells us, and the ball might turn into a subject then (Michel, 2015). Against this stands EMCA studies that focus on interactions with objects (objects being objects and people being subjects) (Tuncer et al., 2019). I aim for a discussion of a new third way between this subject-object distinction. It has tentatively been called assemmethodology (Due, 2023). Data are from ethnographic studies of a Danish team, where an automated VEO camera recorded whole matches with an AI available that tracks the ball.

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Due, B. L. (2023). Situated socio-material assemblages: Assemmethodology in the making. Human Communication Research, hqad031. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad031
Evans, B., & Lindwall, O. (2020). Show Them or Involve Them? Two Organizations of Embodied Instruction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 53(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2020.1741290
Evans, B., & Reynolds, E. (2016). The Organization of Corrective Demonstrations Using Embodied Action in Sports Coaching Feedback. Symbolic Interaction, 39(4), 525–556. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.255
Michel, S. (2015). Statues: The second book of foundations. Bloomsbury.
Tuncer, S., Licoppe, C., & Haddington, P. (2019). When objects become the focus of human action and activity: Object- centred sequences in social interaction. Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift Zur Verbalen Interaktion, 20.
Whitehead, A. N. (1979). Process and Reality (D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne, Eds.; 2nd Revised edition edition). Free Press.