CADS Research Seminar
The Times, They Are A Changin’: Multiple, Diverging, and Conjoining Temporalities in Sport for Development and Peace
- Thomas Carter
- Date
- Monday 9 March 2026
- Time
- Series
- CADS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Agora
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 0B23
This paper focuses on the temporalities embedded in international development projects. Specifically, the question of time as projected by development discourse and program practices in relation to local senses of time. Development is predicated upon a projection of a particular kind of “modern” future. Local organizations and people, however, may or may not have futures imagined or to be enacted that concur or even acknowledge the developmental future of international development. This is especially so when sport is used as a development tool, for sport especially projects a specific kind of modern future. Within the communities, the “recipients” of “development” not only think time in myriads of ways but also sense time in different ways. Futures, presents, and pasts are not just imagined but sensed as part of individuals’ and communities’ own senses of time that form part of their sensory ecologies. This paper, thus attempts to discern how the people targeted by development programs and the relationships between program deliverers and local residents negotiate these various temporalities thereby, hopefully, raising a number of questions for discussion.
Overall, this paper is a rough draft of one chapter of a larger ethnographic monograph that focuses on much of what is missing from the Sport for Development (and Peace) scholarship and knowledge production in the sector. More than simply local voices not being heard, what is entirely absent are what, at least in theory, are the motivations, lives, communities, hopes and fears, changes, and relationships development projects in communities engender. I am particularly concerned with notions of change, values, success, movement (mobility and migration), time (futures, presents and pasts). This draft stems from ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Sport for Development and Peace sector as a Director of a small NGO that works and has worked on four continents.
About Thomas Carter
Thomas Carter is Reader in Anthropology in the School of Education, Sport, and Health Sciences at the University of Brighton, Director of the South Coast Doctoral Training Program for that University, and A Senior Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. He is also Director of Football4Peace International.