Praxis is a concept that has emerged from the work of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, and more specifically, his influential text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005; originally published in 1970), which championed a revolutionary philosophy of education aimed at enabling oppressed peoples to overcome their social conditions and participate in their own liberation. Transcending the educational context, Freire’s (2005) notion of praxis refers to the dialectical process of
reflecting and acting upon the world to transform it and achieve social justice. According to Freire, emancipation can only occur when oppressors and the oppressed (or colonizers and colonized/ leadership and people/ researchers and participants) come together to critically reflect on reality and then take collaborative, informed action upon it. He explained:
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be
manipulated. (Freire, 2005, p. 65)
Expanding on this concept within the context of critical research in the human sciences, Lather (1987) defined praxis-oriented research as committed to a transformative agenda, aimed at challenging social inequalities through knowledge production processes that engage and
empower marginalized participants. Thus, praxis links with critical forms of inquiry and PAR in that it opposes traditional scientific norms that maintain tacit power imbalances and social inequities, and alternatively, elicits a transformative agenda that is carried out with the oppressed rather than for them (Lather, 1987; Singer, 1994). Such efforts rely on an epistemology of experiential knowing, which challenges researchers to reconsider the type of knowledge they produce in the academic realm by connecting it with the lived experiences of marginalized people (Blodgett, Schinke, Peltier, Fisher, Watson, & Wabano, 2011; Fisher et al., 2003). The intent is to develop emancipatory knowledge that is based on and resonates with the lived experiences of marginalized groups and develops possibilities for creating meaningful change within their lives (Lather, 1987). This knowledge is developed through the dialectical alignment of theory and action, wherein emancipatory theoretical concerns and commitments inform and connect to the performance of contextually driven, participatory research, which then produces
knowledge that reciprocally connects back to theoretical efforts (Lather, 1987). Thus, praxis, as a continual process of reflecting and acting, serves as a link between academic and applied work (Fisher et al., 2003). It becomes a core feature of work for researchers and communities who want to affect change in the world rather than simply describe it.
Within sport psychology, praxis has emerged from critiques of the dominant scientific model for seeking objective analyses of human experience in sport and removing the person from the process of knowing, as well as isolating research efforts from the larger sociocultural context in which they are embedded (Martens, 1987; Sage, 1993). Particular concerns regarding the ethnocentric bias of traditional sport psychology paradigms and their disenfranchising effects on minority sport populations have led to the push for a new area of sport psychology that is intersected with cultural studies, termed “sport psychology as cultural praxis” (Fisher et al., 2003; Ryba, 2005; Ryba, Stambulova, Si, & Schinke, 2013; Ryba & Wright, 2005; Schinke et al., 2012). As the primary agents of the cultural praxis movement within sport psychology, Ryba and Wright (2005) clarified that cultural praxis blends together cultural studies theory, activism as practice, and empirical research as the mediator between theory and practice, “with the various components held together with a progressive politics that focuses on social difference, equity, and justice” (p. 201). Through these efforts, sport psychology is opened up to questions about athletes’ subjective experiences of being gendered, raced, sexualized, disabled, etc., as well as the ways athletes express their identities and negotiate power in their lives (McGannon & Smith, 2015). Thus, centralized at the intersection of CSP and praxis (and linking with whiteness studies) is a re-examination of athletes’ identities which opposes the traditional notion of identity as a singular and stable category through which an individual can easily be defined. Instead, the individual is viewed as “a subject of multiple discourses and various identifications, a member of
numerous social and cultural groups, and a part of sport as an institution immersed in a particular sociocultural and historical context” (Ryba & Wright, 2005, p. 204). Individuals are understood as having fragmented identities within various discourses of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, physicality, and able-bodiedness. This awareness pushes sport psychology researchers to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and engage in more idiosyncratic and interpretivist research projects that account for the sociocultural complexities of participants’ identities and experiences.
However, beyond a theoretical discussion of sport psychology as cultural praxis, very little empirical research has been carried out with an explicit praxis agenda. The research of Bredemeier and colleagues (see Bredemeier, 2001; Bredemeier et al., 1991; Bredemeier, Carlton, Hills, & Oglesby, 1999) stand as the first core examples of praxis in action within sport
psychology, though the authors employed a feminist approach to emphasize the experiences of women in physical activity settings. Following suit from a race and ethnicity perspective, Blodgett and colleagues engaged in praxis to re-conceptualize youth sport programming on an Aboriginal Reserve in order to encourage active lifestyles through meaningful cultural practices (Blodgett, Schinke, Fisher, Wassengeso George, Peltier, Ritchie et al, 2008; Blodgett, Schinke, Fisher, Yungblut, Recollet-Saikkonen, Peltier et al., 2010), and explore the research experiences and recommendations of Aboriginal community members (Blodgett, Schinke, Peltier, Fisher, Watson, & Wabano, 2011; Blodgett, Schinke, Peltier, Wabano, Fisher, Eys et al., 2010; Blodgett, Schinke, Smith, Peltier, & Pheasant, 2011). Each effort was aimed at developing knowledge that was rooted in the lived experiences and voices of participants typically excluded from or
marginalized within the dominant discourses and practices of sport psychology. These
production within applied social change efforts, therein contributing to the theory-action dialect of praxis and the production of research that is more meaningful within people’s lives.
Praxis is suited to the social change efforts that are being advocated within Indigenous communities through the use of decolonizing methodologies. Accordingly, this agenda was integrated within the current research. The relevance of praxis within such an Indigenous decolonizing context is evidenced in the words of Ndimande (2012), who was engaged in research with Black South African parents:
…I became cautious throughout this fieldwork not to enter these communities to
appropriate their thoughts, experiences, personal life stories, and their daily struggles, as doing so would perpetuate the stereotypical practices of mainstream, colonizing research. Instead, I tried to establish a sociocultural and political understanding that could connect what I call the “world of academic research” to the “world of the oppressed peoples.” (p. 222)
Such an approach, aimed at connecting the academic realm to the lived realities of local people, is responsive to the call for praxis to be incorporated within CSP as a means of opening up the monolithic boundaries of the sport psychology domain to diverse epistemologies and concepts that hold potential for meaningful social change (Fisher et al., 2003; Ryba, 2005; Ryba & Wright, 2005; Schinke et al., 2012).