What can Philosophical Archaeology tell us about the Crisis of Modern Sport (Pt1)? Dr Sandra Meeuwsen - Meaningful Sport Series

Modern sport has an increasingly contradictory face: on the one hand, we can see a positive impact of sport in our societies, but on the other hand, we increasingly often hear about abuse and misconduct in sport, including sexual harassment, doping and corruption. How can we make sense of these contradictory trends and how can philosophical analysis help us to vision a more balanced, or more meaningful future for sport?

Dr Sandra Meeuwsen is a philosopher of sport who worked in various vital positions in sport since the early 1990s. She encountered these contradictions of sport in daily work which led her to embark on a PhD project to understand these issues. She completed her PhD in 2020 at the Faculty of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels with the thesis "A Critique of Sportive Reason; a philosophical archaeology of modern sport”.

In her thesis, she drew on Foucault, Agamben, Spinoza and psychoanalytical approaches to analyse our ‘knowing’ about what sport is - and what is excluded - and the shifts in this knowledge we’ve had since the rise of modern sports to its current existence.

You can find out more about Sandra's work at https://sandrameeuwsen.nl/ and follow her on Twitter @MeeuwsenPhd.