Response-abilities of coaching practices:Fieldworlding with esports coaches to disrupt the tight ontologics of health and physical activity

Esports in Denmark have transformed from home-based leisure activities to structured practices within community-based clubs. This sportification has intensified the focus on health and physical activity (PA). Specifically, national sports organizations and research efforts try to integrate neoliberalised forms of PA into esports training to address sedentariness, enhance performance, and promote social relations. However, this intensification raises questions about what forms of PAs are being produced and how these intensities shape the relational (im)possibilities of esport bodies to become healthy? Esports coaches often resist normative expectations of PA, emphasizing that players (and coaches themselves) value esports as distinct/different from ‘traditional’ sports—a (safe) space where bodies aren't judged or disciplined by normative measures of physical performance and appearance. As part of a PhD project, the present paper explores the possibilities for thinking through Barad’s (2007) agential realist ontology and the concept of response-ability (ability to respond). As the entangled/composite performer of the project, “iii” diffractively trace how esports coaching (at one esport club in Denmark) was rendered capable of responding differently to the intensification of PA occurring in tight neoliberalised ontologics. Such tracings materialized from m“iii” collaborative-coffeeconversations, writing-as-thinking-and-raging, and theorizing-as-(re)imagining performances with coaches at the club. Response-ability was cared for as a process of listening, slowing down, and the art of noticing (Tsing, 2013). An act of making the morethan-human other (technology, weather conditions, clothes) capable of responding to what it might mean to (be)come physically active and health(y) beyond normative guidelines or the metrics of tight ontologics. This process “took time” (several months) as “iii” was immersed in the conventional neoliberal logics of engaging in academic fieldwork (as my PhD funding dictated I should do). However, in this presentation, m“iii” aim is not to describe my fieldwork but to trace the doings of spacetimemattering that generelated alternative openings for imagining the relational practices of health and movement within the club. For example, iii talked with the coaches about agential realism and how ethics are always entangled in knowing and becoming (i.e., ethico-onto-epistemology; Barad, 2007). As Mazzei and Jackson(2022) would say, to create openings by thinking with theory. Through these long, fun, and sometimes chaotic talkings, we unleashed becomings that fueled (along with coffee) our process of thinking-together: writing. Writing became a place for different differences to live—keeping thought on the move. We all have thoughts that feel too risky to voice (“iii” am expressing some of these thoughts right now through this abstract). Google Docs became territories for expressing forbidden sticky stuff: “screw those dominant, neoliberal, and developmental strategies for coaching/teaching/being around youth these days…” Hold on In sum, M“iii” PhD was thus less “fieldwork” and more “fieldworlding”, not observing from a distance but intravening and performing from the middle creating alternate worlds of possibilities for how esport players could move at the club. By attuning to and noticing differences, other relational (im)possibilities took form, loosening the ontologics of how to do inquiry with theory within the entangled phenomena of esport, health, and physical activity.