In the Company of Contradiction: Co-Generating Imperfect Activism Through a Humanitarian Trailwalking Event

Activism is commonly understood as linear, intentional, strategic, and outcome-driven, while sport is framed as a visible platform for prosocial action. Yet such frameworks struggle to account for activist practice as it unfolds through ambiguity, partial engagement, and relational process. This study introduces imperfect activism as an analytic orientation for understanding ethical engagement not as outcome but as uneven becoming, a continuous process that unfolds through contradiction, partial knowing, and relational adjustment. Guided by postqualitative inquiry, seven scholars engage Oxfam Trailwalker Korea 2025, a long-distance trailwalking humanitarian sporting event, not as successful or failed activism but as a site where imperfect activism becomes perceptible. We participated in the event, followed by 27 weeks of ongoing individual and collective reflection, which did not function as sequential stages but as overlapping conditions throughout which ethical tensions became perceptible and were reworked: the capacity to hold discomfort when encountering material contradictions, the unraveling of sport logics as performance lost its meaning, and nature's silence when climate justice rhetoric failed to acknowledge structural complicity. Generated through seven unstable voices and intra-active sense-making, inquiry reveals how one scholar's challenge became another's recognition of relational care. This collective inquiry highlighted how complementary lenses can address individual perceptual limits, sustaining activism not as a state of being but as an ongoing practice of becoming. In doing so, we challenge dominant sport activism frameworks that privilege visibility and outcomes, demonstrating instead how contradiction can function as a generative space for rethinking activism, justice, and movement.