From integration to conviviality: Rethinking belonging in sport

Dominant approaches to sport and migration, particularly integration-focused frameworks, struggle to capture the relational, situated, and often contradictory dynamics shaping participation in superdiverse sporting contexts. This conceptual paper advances conviviality and convivial disintegration as alternative lenses for analysing how belonging and non-belonging are negotiated through ordinary, embodied, and uncertain sporting encounters. The paper introduces a four-dimensional framework ( spaces, practices, fractures, and opportunities ) that explains how sporting interactions are structured, performed, disrupted, and imagined. The framework moves beyond binary notions of inclusion and exclusion by highlighting the coexistence of cooperation and tension within sport. By shifting attention from integration models to relational processes of belonging, the paper contributes to post-integration debates and offers a novel conceptual foundation for future empirical research on the social role of sport in superdiverse settings.