YOUTHMOVE · Towards ‘youth boards’ in nonprofit sport organisations: a youth focused citizen social science for inclusive sport services

With ongoing migration waves, new questions arise about the integration of migrants, especially migrant youth who have emerging double cultural identities. Not understanding its value and having double consciousness may lead to further stigmatisation, (self)exclusion and conflict among communities. These already affect young people's sport & PA (physical activity) trends as they lean towards separate(d) sports clubs, a more ethnopluralist form of involvement through sport or an effort to gain a form of cultural capital. This project aims to design a 'youth board' model for nonprofit sports organisations (local sports clubs, sports federations) to achieve culturally diverse sports services. The project will prioritise empowering the agency of young people from a multidisciplinary perspective through youth-focused citizen social science and implement digital youth participatory action research titled DigY-PAR via conventional and digital data collection methods (e.g. digital storytelling and crowdsourcing). Inductively, we will embrace an intersectional perspective and analyse youth sports participation trends by conducting qualitative and quantitative data-collecting techniques. In the project, I will use Du Bois's (1903) double consciousness concept to analyse the affect of having multiple cultural identities with migrant youth and, overall, how it affects their sports participation trends. The project will also involve a secondment with Sport.Brussels organisation to cooperate in preparing and operating the 'youth board' as a model for sports organisations. Overall, the project will help me to develop new research skills about digital humanities, cultural emotion studies, youth involvement and state-of-the-art quantitative research techniques, allow me to be part of diversity efforts and experiment with co-creating a youth-led, innovative digital governance mechanism 'youth board' in one of the leading sports organisations of Belgium, Sport.Brussels.