Structural Inequality,Homelessness,and Moral Worth: Salvaging the Self through Sport?

Abstract

This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produced an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor within and through a weekly sport-for-development program in the distinct settler-colonial context of Edmonton, Alberta. For over two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban ‘underclass’, one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three-years of ethnographic field notes and interviews with ten men aged 25–42 years, our analysis revealed how these weekly sporting interludes served as convivial, safe, and consistent events that nurtured the development of long-term meaningful relationships with other participants and social workers, as well as a genuine sense of community. The weekly floor hockey matches were, thus, powerful sites in the broader struggle for what David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993) have called “salvaging the self” for men who embodied a repertoire of trauma and who are regularly positioned as morally devalued subjects who lacked personal responsibility and self-governance.

Keywords

sport-for-development homelessness sport sociology urban ethnograpy

Introduction

In David Snow and Leon Anderson’s (1993) Down on their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People, the authors devoted significant attention to exploring the social interactions and relationships forged among individuals experiencing homelessness in Austin, Texas—a sharp contrast from popular depictions of these individuals as socially withdrawn, isolated, and deviant (1993, 172). Indeed, over the course of their ethnography, the authors analyzed an array of caring social networks and supportive community relationships that enhanced the survivability and overall quality of life. For Snow and Anderson (1993), these networks supported and promoted a governing logic best captured by the idiom “what goes around, comes around”—a moral code that “pulls the homeless together, creating at least a tenuous sense of mutuality and solidarity” (1993, 108).

Throughout our research in the Western Canadian city center of Edmonton, Alberta, we encountered a similar network of mutuality and solidarity among a group of young men experiencing homelessness who were involved in a weekly sport-for-development program centered upon the sport of floor hockey.¹ For over two decades, this floor hockey program had been organized by Wesley (a pseudonym), a white, middle-aged, social worker, and an employee of a harm reduction center (HRC) in Edmonton’s downtown core.² The floor hockey program was, thus, distinct from many other sport-for-development initiatives and frontline social services that often rely on low-paid, precariously employed, and volunteer labor forces to deliver vital social supports and, hence, are difficult to sustain. The floor hockey program was also unique precisely because it was supported by various local actors who regularly helped to identify, filter, and encourage individuals to take part in this weekly sporting ritual with insight from both Wesley and a core group of the game’s regular attendees.³

Between 2010 and 2013, the lead author (JK) was immersed within this sporting community of mostly young men—many of whom were Indigenous—and participated in these weekly floor hockey matches as part of a broader multiyear ethnography on precarity and on sporting and leisure practices in downtown Edmonton. Our initial research focused on the inherent tensions and contradictions of the uses of sport as a ‘corrective’ technology for a group of ‘high risk’ young men who are regularly stereotyped and pathologized as both economic failures and racialized violent offenders in a neoliberal urban environment. As our study progressed, however, we became aware of a wide range of informal economies and networks of social solidarity that were nurtured over the course of this weekly ritual, including: alerting people to the existence of new sport programs, financial opportunities, and social services; sharing knowledge about safe places to eat, sleep, gamble, relax, practice self-care, and hide from potential threats; offering companionship during the lonely and isolating days of depression and detoxification; providing counsel through personal hardship and loss; and offering love and affection over the holiday season (see Scherer, Koch, and Holt 2016). These men, as we discovered, regularly leaned on each other, and, especially, Wesley, their trusted social worker who ran the weekly floor hockey program with the utmost consistency. The weekly games were a critical and constant resource of hope on which they could rely—a stabilizing force of community amidst the precariousness of employment, housing, and social programming in the neoliberal city.

In what follows, we provide an analysis of the cultural and social dynamics embedded within this particular sporting community, especially the noncommodified practices of reciprocity and the enactment of socially beneficial labor facilitated through this weekly ritual. By socially beneficial labor, we simply mean “the love of our neighbours” (Livingstone 2016, 96). Importantly, our analysis of these dynamics was also shaped by the program’s rapid transformation and near collapse in 2014—a development that coincided with an economic recession and the Government of Alberta’s decision to incorporate Friday hockey into a newly created Health and Wellness Program (HWP), a nonprofit organization lacking state capacity and resources. While Friday hockey continues to tenuously exist under this model, the transition has radically altered the structure of the program, resulting in the loss of Wesley as a steward of the games and his replacement by a precariously employed contract worker (and the third author of this manuscript).

Edmonton’s Neoliberal City and the Ethnographic Setting

Located in the Western Canadian province of Alberta, the City of Edmonton (pop. 972,223) is the fifth largest municipality in Canada. Known as the ‘Gateway to the North’, Edmonton is the northern anchor of the Calgary-Edmonton corridor—the staging point for large-scale oil sands developments in Northern Alberta. Beginning in the new millennium, following a significant recession in the 1980s, Edmonton experienced enormous economic growth thanks to a resource-driven boom and the expansion of the oil sands (Taft 2012). Over the next decade, significant wealth and money flowed into the city and, alongside Calgary, Edmonton emerged as an important ‘arriviste’ urban center as a result of strong oil prices and economic diversification (Hiller 2007). During this time, Edmonton was also substantially transformed by migration—young men and families from peripheral regions in Canada—as well as immigrants from around the world seeking employment in the extensive oil sands reserves of northern Alberta and other sectors of the economy.

However, while Edmonton continues to grow in both population size and ambition, levels of social inequality have also continued to expand, especially as neoliberal polices have intensified across Alberta,⁴ further eroding the welfare state and simultaneously enlarging the power of the private sector (Harvey 2005). It is helpful, then, to follow Wendy Brown (2006) in understanding neoliberalism as an achieved and normative political rationality that involves a specific organization of the social, the subject, and the state according to market criteria. Included here is the development of numerous policies that produce citizens as individual consumers and entrepreneurs whose moral worth is positively conflated with one’s capacity for ‘self-care’, including “their ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions” (2006, 694). The turn towards neoliberalism in Alberta (and elsewhere), as Donna Wood (2015) observed, has thus been associated with the philosophical ascendance of “moral conservatism” as a governing logic, and where those considered to be undeserving receive little social assistance for fear they will grow dependent on government handouts.

Levels of homelessness also grew significantly in Edmonton over this time, especially during the mid-2000s, as exploding housing prices, rental rates, and an inadequate supply of social housing stretched the limits of the city’s working poor who have historically resided in the downtown core in proximity to both shelters (e.g., Hope Mission, Herb Jamieson center, Women’s Emergency Accommodation center, and the Salvation Army) and various nonprofit social service providers (e.g., Boyle Street Community Services, Bissell center, the George Spady center, Boyle McCauley Health center, and the Mustard Seed).⁵ After the onset of another significant recession in 2014 following the collapse of global oil prices, according to the city’s bi-annual count in 2018, at least 1,971 individuals were experiencing homelessness in Edmonton despite a stated political commitment in 2009 to “End Homelessness” by 2019 (Turner Strategies 2018)—a count that appeared to moderately reverse the trend of growing homelessness in Edmonton, but was contested by outreach facilities, frontline support workers, and social service agencies who publicized concerns about the count’s methodology.⁶ The Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECHH) has also reported that the number of deaths linked to homelessness had risen from 51 in 2015 to more than double the following year, and to as high as 107 deaths in 2017 and 95 in 2018 (Cook 2018, 2019).

The deep-seated racialization of poverty in Edmonton is evidenced by the fact that just over half (52%) of all people experiencing homelessness in 2018 were Indigenous, despite comprising only 6% of the city’s total population (Turner Strategies 2018). Such racialized inequalities underscore the complex legacy and ongoing manifestations of settler-colonialism in Canada—and in Alberta specifically—and the categorical failure of successive levels of Canadian government to reconcile the long-standing social issues associated with this history. The exacerbation of racialized poverty is also reflective of Edmonton’s northern location, while the city is home to the second largest urban Indigenous population in Canada (61,765), the majority of whom are Métis and Cree.

The uneven impacts of neoliberalism are well known; over the course of the past three decades, the lives of countless working-and-lower-middle class men, women, and youth have become increasingly precarious in urban centers across the world (Standing 2014). Furthermore, as the downtown cores of innumerable North American cities have hollowed out over this time, and as predominantly middle-class families relocated to the suburbs, an ever-expanding underclass of “urban outcasts” (Wacquant 2008) have been left to live and die in conditions of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. The fallout of these developments, of course, has only been exacerbated by the transformation of the role of government from its ‘managerialism’ of public resources to its propagation of ‘entrepreneurialism’ vis-à-vis various tax incentives and corporate subsidies as a means to help cope with the withdrawal of all levels of government from the provision of social services (Harvey 2016, 133–158).

Under these structural conditions, as many have observed, an abundance of sport-for-development and physical activity-based programs have been implemented by a range of public and private partners, in part, as corrective technologies aimed at modifying the behaviors and attitudes of ‘at risk’ youth (Darnell, Field, and Kidd 2019, 163–181). The most prominent of these initiatives, for example, has been the widely celebrated Midnight Basketball crime prevention programs that have targeted African-American youth and young men of color in the United States as part of the “social problems industry” in urban sport and recreation provision (Pitter and Andrews 1997). Such sport-for-development programming has been widely critiqued for encouraging individual ‘solutions’ to complex public problems; for their often patronizing and top-down delivery within marginalized communities; and for attempting to inculcate dominant/neoliberal values in vulnerable populations (Coalter 2010; Darnell 2007; Donnelly and Coakley 2002; Forde 2014; Gruneau 2015; Hartmann 2016; Hartmann and Depro 2006; Levermore 2008; Magee and Jeanes 2013; Pitter 2004; Pitter and Andrews 1997; Wilson and White 2003). However, it is important to acknowledge that this programming also functions as sites where even the most marginalized groups can come together to contest and challenge dominant understandings of both labor and leisure. As Bryan Clift (2019, 93) explained in his ethnography of a nonprofit that engages those recovering from homelessness through the practice of running, “The body is lived in ways that conform, exceed, and challenge social construction.”

Our urban ethnography among men experiencing homelessness in Edmonton set out to explore these tensions and contradictions as they were expressed through a weekly floor hockey game/sport-for-development program aimed, in part, at reforming the city’s urban ‘underclass’. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic field notes and interviews with 10 participants aged 25–42 years, our analysis revealed that these weekly sporting interludes provided an important site and resource through which these men exercised and imagined their personhood in contrast to the depoliticized discourse of personal responsibility and individualism that is otherwise emblematic of the neoliberal era (Skeggs 2011). In what follows, we highlight several distinct strategies that emerged among a community of men largely alienated by dominant economic and historical forces—men who regularly faced a repertoire of complex structural issues in Edmonton, yet came together each week to effectively produce an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor through the sport of floor hockey.

Methods

Between 2011 and 2013, JK served as a participant observer at the weekly sport-for-development floor hockey games. Crucially, JK not only attended ‘Friday hockey’ matches but also volunteered at the HRC and joined various community events—camping trips, sporting events, community feasts, etc.—alongside community members. These experiences enabled the establishment of meaningful and long-term relationships with a group of individuals that continue to the present day—individuals who have significant and genuine reasons for distrusting university representatives.⁷ These relationships also enabled us to conduct a series of interviews with 10 men who regularly participated in the weekly floor hockey games,⁸ and with 14 different community support workers and social service providers in downtown Edmonton. All of these interviews were open-ended and semi-structured in nature, and took place only after extensive rapport and trust had been nurtured to minimize the risk of alienating the men from their programming. The player interviews took place in a setting at which the men felt comfortable (usually at a quiet restaurant, café, or occasionally at a player’s private residence/dwelling). Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of all involved.

In terms of the weekly floor hockey matches, it is important to point out that JK also traveled to the games each week with the men from the HRC in a communal van subsidized by the Government of Alberta and driven by Wesley. The van rides were a vital component of the weekly ritual and enabled both Wesley and JK to visit with the players in a fashion that was otherwise difficult during the course of the game when the men were either on the floor playing or catching their breath on the sidelines. After collecting the men from various social service facilities, public housing units, or from a designated street corner or alley-way in the city center, the van would proceed to a small gymnasium located in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in north Edmonton. The gym was basic in every sense of term: no windows, bleachers, banners, or frills; only two small locker rooms, a water fountain, and two short benches upon which the players would rest between shifts.

Before entering the playing area, the men would be greeted by a senior-level female staff member (Selma, a pseudonym) who had helped Wesley coordinate the hockey program from within the hospital for several years. Selma and her staff were instrumental to the successful operation of Friday hockey, ensuring that each player was provided with a clean T-shirt, shorts, running shoes, socks, and a plastic-bladed hockey stick to participate in the games. Selma also provided players with access to locks, lockers, towels, and shampoo as part of the overall standards of welfare for the group. Occasionally, other men (and sometimes women) from various public outreach facilities, and a small number of individuals who were receiving treatment and therapy at the hospital, also attended the games. In addition, select members of the hospital staff would occasionally participate in the floor hockey matches as a means to nurture better relationships with their patients and, as several hospital staff also noted throughout our ethnography, simply “for the fun of it.”

Over the course of the next hour or so, participants would compete in a semi-competitive and, at times, physical game of floor hockey. All of the players cared deeply about their individual and team performances and, thus, habitually worked themselves to the point of exhaustion in pursuit of goals, assists, or whenever a crucial play was on-the-line. Nevertheless, scores were rarely kept; nor were victories declared publicly (with the exception of players tallying their own individual goals and assists). In addition to these informal rules, skilled players almost always tried to accommodate others, offering them more time and space in which to maneuver the puck—a style of play that was not enforced by Wesley, but that was commonly understood as ‘the right thing to do’. This contributed to a fun and lively atmosphere that was generally inclusive of all skill-levels and was forgiving to those players who were either new to the game or had been away for some time due to work, poor health, incarceration, or for other personal reasons.

More importantly, though, the game day ritual was accompanied by a rich and ongoing dialogue between the participants, Wesley, and JK about a variety of topics ranging from playing strategies, weekend plans, life histories and experiences, and social troubles and triumphs (e.g., work, housing, addictions, and relationship-related, etc.). The easy-going nature of this dialogue would continue throughout all phases of the pre-game, game time, and postgame rituals, including the postgame communal showers and the van rides to and from the hospital. Indeed, the camaraderie nourished throughout these rituals enabled a unique type of relationship—especially between Wesley and the group of young men—that, as other researchers have also noted, is difficult to establish in more conventional counseling settings (Magee, Spaaij, and Jeanes 2015).

JK, a white, male PhD student in his late 20s at the time of this fieldwork, had no training as a mental health or social worker. However, his training in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, and his own athletic experiences and easy-going disposition translated into a valuable form of cultural capital with the players in attendance. As a result, Wesley gradually entrusted JK with certain organizational duties and social obligations, including making/dividing the teams and timekeeping. Finally, the third author (Rylan), inconsistently attended the floor hockey games from the summer of 2012 until the fall of 2013, which marked the program’s end under Wesley’s stewardship. Rylan, thus, had a unique vantage point from which to view the program’s transition, and he became responsible for navigating the changeover as the incoming coordinator of the HWP, a nonprofit that was created to save costs by streamlining the delivery of sport, recreation, and wellness programming throughout the city center. However, Rylan did not possess Wesley’s extensive relationship network, while the HWP also lacked the resources and capacity of the state, which meant that the transition to a new model for Friday hockey was not without its difficulties—a matter we return to in our concluding remarks.

“That’s Why We Protect Spaces Like This”

By September 2011, JK had observed that the community forged through Friday hockey was not only highly coveted but also carefully guarded and controlled by its participants as a safe venue in which they could relax and have fun with their peers, and as a reprieve from the scrutinizing gaze of outsiders. This was an observation that was made clear by the fact that JK had only himself become aware of Friday hockey after having spent close to one-year volunteering at the HRC, and after nourishing trusted relationships with several of the game’s regular participants. Certainly, the game’s relative secrecy can be criticized for alienating potential participants (e.g., individuals who were either new to the city, the newly homeless, other people with disabilities, and women, in particular). Still, the role of its gatekeepers must also be understood as generative for a group of young men forced to survive within the margins of an urban setting that routinely deprives them of safe spaces and more traditional means to assert individual/group boundaries, for example, access to independent housing, sufficient economic capital, and access to both public and private transportation.

Consider the following dialogue between JK and Mike—an Indigenous man in his late 30s who had participated in Friday hockey for over 15 years—who explained how floor hockey provides an oasis of reprieve for a select group of participants, including many with mental illness and also for those who have experienced trauma:

Mike:

We’re [Friday hockey] a tight community, eh? A lot of people don’t realize that. We’ve got to protect that because tightness keeps people safe, you know? If you’ve ever. . .because I’ve been there. I’ve lived it, you know? The thing with mental illness is that some of us can be the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet. We don’t wanna hurt anybody because we understand what it means to be hurt, you know? The majority of us have been hurt. Some of us are the greatest human beings and we find so much therapeutic value just in playing hockey among ourselves because it’s clean and nobody hurts each other; nobody’s physically hurting each other; nobody’s verbally hurting each other. We’ve felt what that’s all about. That’s why we protect spaces like this. Everybody here finds such value in just playing hockey and interacting with people on a level where we feel safe, you know? We’re safe and we know we can just be ourselves without being judged. Sure, we joke around every now and then about certain situations, but we understand that it’s just joking. Nobody’s hurting each other emotionally or we’re not in the back alley with bats. We’re on the floor with hockey sticks, you know? (Personal communication, December 1, 2012)

Conversations of this nature occurred numerous times over the course of our fieldwork, revealing several issues related to the distinct community forged through Friday hockey. First, Mike emphasized that Friday hockey afforded a safe and secure venue for a particular group of men to play hockey and interact with one another. This needs to be understood as a judgment-free zone of “protected sociability” (Wacquant 2004, 26) for those who feel threatened within many dominant settler-colonial institutions, including various sites of sport, recreation, and leisure throughout Edmonton. Crucially, Mike also alluded to the embodied nature of mental illness and racialized poverty as a distinguishing feature of the Friday hockey community. In this sense, the ‘tightness’ of the bonds that he described among the players have been forged experientially and physically, and are rooted in their capacity to empathize with others enduring similar life circumstances, as opposed to being based on their economic worth and/or athletic proficiency. The relative secrecy of Friday hockey, thus, helped to prevent the further victimization of participants, and was not an act of exclusivity or elitism—an observation that is also consistent with existing sport-for-development research on the cultivation of safe spaces (Kunz 2009; Spaaij and Schulenkorf, 2014; Sugden 2010).

Of significance to this latter point, Friday hockey was never publicly advertised on posters, or circulated widely on Instagram or Facebook: information was solely communicated to potential players through word-of-mouth invitations distributed by both Wesley and the game’s regular participants. Even last-minute game cancellations—which happened on occasion due to poor weather/driving conditions—were confirmed by Wesley through a mass text/email sent to a designated participant list. Moreover, as the field note below recounts, the players themselves would restrict their invitations to individuals who they believed would maintain a lighthearted atmosphere and who could be counted on to lift-up the spirits of others through the production of socially beneficial labour.

Brandon:

Make sure you invite Theo back next week, eh Robby? He’s got the right attitude! (Field note, June 15, 2012).

In this way, then, the penetration of street/gang politics into the Friday hockey game was also actively and collaboratively monitored by the players and by Wesley who, with insight from the regular players, occasionally reached out to particular individuals or even suspended invitations to avoid potential altercations and disputes. The following field note documents one such occasion in which Wesley pre-emptively de-escalated an impending altercation, issuing a candid warning to a player who routinely ‘lost his cool’ during competition:

Wesley:

I don’t want any trouble this week, you got that Sam? This is your last chance. I’m not gonna let you play if you can’t control your temper.

Sam:

Who says I can’t control my temper?

Wesley:

Me. I do. And I’m not the only one. You’re starting to get a bad reputation, so keep your temper in-check, okay? (Field note, December 8, 2012)

While player warnings and suspensions of this nature were rare, they reinforced Friday hockey as a site for both the politics of inclusion and exclusion (Crouch 2006), and for the nurturing of a preferred sporting community among those individuals experiencing homelessness. A more commonly-used tactic by Wesley to reduce friction and cultivate bonding was to strategically place conflicting personalities on the same team—a tactic that he also deployed with assistance from the other players who offered insights into the various tensions and rivalries.

Indeed, all of the players consented to a host of ‘joint values’ and underlying codes of conduct that bound them individually to the broader group. For example, another rule that was collaboratively developed to nourish a safe and secure atmosphere was simply that no spectators were permitted at Friday hockey. Wesley half-jokingly threatened that he would not hesitate to leave those individuals who had attended the match, but had not actually played, at the psychiatric hospital in North Edmonton. So, too, were personal cameras and other recording devices prohibited from use during the game; this was meant to be a safe space, and a space of privacy—a policy that was not always easy to enforce, given that Wesley had been regularly approached by news agencies to write stories on Friday hockey as a means to attract sponsorship revenue. In this way, then, Friday hockey functioned as a scarce public resource for reducing stigma and social isolation, and for nurturing community among men with mental illness and addiction-related issues (Magee, Spaaij, and Jeanes 2015).

Hardship

As noted earlier, the van rides to and from the psychiatric hospital provided a valuable space for social interactions, peer bonding, and for the (re)production of socially beneficial labor. In these instances, and in full contrast to the “presentation of their selves” in other settings, many of the men were less guarded about their personal lives and volunteered more intimate details about their hopes and struggles. So, too, did the relatively insular nature of Friday hockey afford unique opportunities for many of the men to express vulnerability and to receive collective support for suffering in the face of hardship.

Consider the following reflection from Maddox—an Indigenous man who was in his late 30s at the time of our first interview:

Maddox:

It [Friday hockey] is not gonna change the employment rate or take people off addictions, but I can tell you that when you’re depressed or, you know, certainly when I got the notice about cancer. . .. I mean everybody hears that big word and, you know, you get offset. You can suddenly go into a depressing. . .depressed. . .very depressive moment where you just wanna give up, you know? Certainly, the thought was in mind to just end it, but you know when you’re around it all the time, you’re in amongst it—people who are let down by life or let down by family or let down by whatever, right? That can be really depressing. Some of us can adapt, but what about those who can’t? Where can they go? This is the reason we have community, right? People can say, “look, I’m going through a shitload and I just. . .yeah, I’d love to play hockey, when do I go?” I really strongly believe that if hockey wasn’t there we’d have some pretty down people. (Personal communication, March 8, 2013)

Floor hockey, for Maddox and many others, provided participants with a resource of care and support within an urban setting in which many of the traditional social services and institutional programs have been all but abandoned. On the one hand, the program afforded players a fun and relaxing escape from the everyday hardships of street life—“a get away from anything really serious or substantial about the broader circumstances of their life” (Hartmann 2016, 188). On the other hand, though, unprompted conversations about health issues were frequently overheard throughout the van rides to and from floor hockey, including discussions about deeply personal struggles with mental illness, addictions, and the often-insurmountable barriers that the men encountered in pursuit of family, personal relationships, and employment. These conversations, importantly, were rarely dismissed or trivialized by the other men in attendance as ‘out of place’ or as a sign of masculine weakness. On the contrary, the men routinely attended to one another’s hardships and provided whatever collective resources were at their disposal, even if it meant simply listening in a compassionate, supportive, or even in a playful manner.

The following field note dated June 28, 2013, was derived from an interview with Jackson—a young, white man in his mid-20s who struggled with drug addiction. Jackson noted that floor hockey opened-up valuable opportunities for him to decompress with others and to exchange knowledge about potential resources:

Jackson:

People in the van talk to each other, you know, if they’re struggling with something; they’ll tell ‘em, give referrals, let’s call it that, about possible workshops, possible outlets, that they can use to make their life better and to maintain a livelihood. Everybody wants to feel good, you know, no matter who you are. . .you’re a human being. You like feeling good. Hockey helps you to understand what feeling good is—you’re gonna want more. Individuals at hockey interact with each other and they share their experiences about, you know, services that are available if they need them for whatever reason; if they’re suffering from life, you know? And that’s the great thing about hockey—we interact and talk, you know? We don’t demean anybody, not seriously at least. (Personal communication, June 28, 2013)

Jackson’s reflections further demonstrate that Friday hockey afforded a key site for knowledge translation and exchange—a space that enabled “homeless people to gain respite, reflect upon their lives, build new social supports and consider other options in life” (Hodgetts and Stolte 2016, 912). The players clearly felt comfortable speaking with one another about their personal lives, and they used the game as an opportunity to exchange “recipes of knowledge” about potential resources for support (Atkinson 2000). These conversations were grounded in the practical realities of participants, and they were often geared towards simply optimizing their conditions of survival in Edmonton’s city center. Friday hockey, thus, constituted a central element within the players’ broader “geography of survival” and, when “knitted together into a network of public and private spaces and social services,” helped them to “confront and cope with the relations of power that structure everyday life” (Mitchell and Heynen 2009, 613).

Collectively, these reflections shed light on an internally diverse and multifaceted community of men who, at times, consciously maneuvered to carve out their own identities and spaces as a means to protect themselves while resisting being positioned as ‘out of place’. Of course, as Sig Langegger (2015, 4) also acknowledged in his research on homelessness in Denver, Colorado, our use of the term ‘community’ to describe these players has obvious limits, particularly among individuals whose common interests derive from their economic marginalization and from their experiences with mental illness. We nevertheless observed over the course of our ethnography that these men were bound together in powerful and supportive ways, sharing a passion for sport, by circumstance, and, occasionally, by love and the pursuit of community.

Laughing it Off

As noted earlier, we regularly witnessed acts of love, affection, and kindness shared among the participants at Friday hockey, especially when directed towards individuals who were perceived as being particularly depressed, physically injured, or who had recently endured a personal loss or hardship. However, many of these emotional displays of support and solidarity—and their potential to undermine hegemonic masculinity—were often offset by the ability to joke and poke fun at one another about a host of different issues connected to their personal and collective life circumstances: from making fun of the often-outrageous outfits worn by some of the men after visiting a local clothing drive/thrift shop; to calling out an individual’s failed attempt at self-manicuring his hair or tailoring his clothing; to calling attention to the dilapidated state of one’s own teeth: “I’ve got 19 cavities! Fawk sakes!” (Laugh) (Field note, December 8, 2012). Public displays of wit and humor, then, were crucial antidotes to sadness and anxiety for many of the men, and were a way to perform their masculine identities, all while expressing vulnerability. As Carter and Kelley (two regulars at floor hockey) explained,

Carter:

Good or bad, man, it was a laugh. It was the chuckles in the background that made it worthwhile, you know? Like, remember when Jackson came to hockey after butchering his hair with Adam’s clippers and then tried to dye his hair purple with Kool-Aid? What was he thinking? (Laugh) He said he wanted to look ‘youthful’! (Laugh)

Kelley:

Or when Gary found a pair of prescription glasses while (bottle) picking and he suddenly turned into an all-star athlete? Who knew he was that frickin’ blind, man? This whole time! (Laugh) It’s all part of it, man! It’s all part of the lead-up to the game! (Personal communication, August 24, 2012)

Indeed, a defining feature of the Friday hockey game was the collective humor that permeated virtually all phases of the day and that would set the tone for the weekend. The topics that were discussed and understood as being acceptable and socially beneficial included teasing one another over a broad array of personal and social issues, a set of actions that created a valuable window for the men to playfully identify and interpret their personal struggles alongside one another. For example, the laughter that erupted at Jackson’s failed attempts at styling his hair with borrowed clippers and Kool-Aid was only funny because it was also accompanied by a mutual understanding and collective investment in the improvisational character of life in the city center (see Scherer, Koch, and Holt 2016). Likewise, Gary’s “newfound hockey abilities” after finding a pair of prescription eye glasses while dumpster diving was humorous simply because the men knew that Gary would consistently play better if only he had reliable access to eye-care and other health services. The nature of the men’s humor, thus, reflected how support and understanding also took the form of cheekiness, lighthearted banter, and playfully “taking the piss” (Willis 1977, 1979) out of one another.

However, one topic that regularly surfaced during the van rides to floor hockey—and that was emblematic of the underlying connectedness the men forged through humor—pertained to romantic relationships, or lack thereof. The men routinely and genuinely lamented the absence of women in their lives, yet they skillfully found ways to turn their romantic shortcomings into group/self-deprecating humor and community-generating dialogue. An important caveat to this banter, though, is that its orientation was exclusively heterosexual in nature, whilst the broader range of sexualities that exist within the city center were never discussed openly during the van rides. In this sense, then, the van ride functioned as an extension of the traditional male locker room culture that, as Timothy Curry (1991, 123) explained, is largely heteropatriarchal in nature and “mostly about the common interests and the shared identities” of its participants—identities that, at a national level, have also long considered the sport of hockey as a “masculinizing project” for young boys and men threatened by “perceived moral degeneracy” and fears of “social feminization” (Raine 2004, 1).

For example, the following field note dated August 24, 2012, concerns one player’s (Andy, 23 years old, white) struggle to maintain a relationship. The discussion began privately in the front seats of the van between Wesley and Andy, yet soon struck a chord with the other men:

Andy:

She won’t answer my calls, Wes! I missed one call last night and now she won’t even text me back. I don’t fuckin’ get women!

Wesley:

Relax. Why do you always get so worked up about this stuff?

Andy:

I shouldn’t be playing hockey today, Wes. I know she’s gonna be upset if I miss another call. I can’t win with her!

Gilles, a middle-aged French-Canadian man and semi-regular player at Friday hockey, leaned forward from the back seat to share his thoughts on Andy’s personal troubles and insecurities:

Gilles:

Most guys have struggled with relationships their whole lives, Andy. Trust me. The issue is not that you missed her call. The issue is with your face—it’s terrible! (Laugh)

Jason, a 26-year-old Indigenous man and a regular at Friday hockey, in response, playfully teased teased Gilles, in support of Andy:

Jason:

I would be careful about taking advice from this clown, Andy. His girlfriend was triple his size the last time I checked and has also cheated on him at least four times—four times! (Laugh)

Andy:

Are you saying Sarah’s cheating on me?

Brad:

I’m simply saying that Gilles’s situation is worse than yours! (Laugh)

Gilles:

But my face is better! (Laugh) Tabernac, les boys!

The men continued joking back and forth about their romantic struggles and about the challenges of finding intimacy against a backdrop of urban poverty and homelessness. Those few men who were currently engaged in long-term relationships also participated in the banter, offering-up their honest advice and “insider secrets” for securing love, which ranged from the ridiculous (e.g., “Have you tried changing your face?”) to the practical (e.g., tips about secluded locations within the city center to find privacy/intimacy with your partner). The stories that were told were generally lighthearted in nature and intended to nurture a sort of masculine solidarity with Andy who was clearly upset about his failing relationship. The men were, thus, similar to the schoolyard ‘lads’ portrayed in Paul Willis’s (1977) classic study of working-class youth culture in the United Kingdom, in that they attached special importance to the ability to have a ‘laff’: “to defeat boredom and fear, to overcome hardship and problems—as a way out of almost anything” (1977, 29).

To be sure, these types of sexist, and, in the aforementioned note, gendered body-shaming exchanges are problematic in numerous ways. For example, identifying women as the source of frustration in their lives is to risk equipping the men with a perceived license to “correct” women’s behavior by way of physical, psychological, or emotional abuses—acts that are certainly prevalent within the city center and among the leading causes of homelessness for women (YWCA Canada 2012). As Timothy Curry (1998) cautioned of the misogynistic banter that often permeates male locker rooms: “sexist language and attitudes conveyed in the locker were more than a precursor to sexual abuse; they reflected a pattern of abuse already underway” (1998, 213). However, as Robin D.G. Kelley (1997) explained in his seminal study of the culture wars in urban America, what is at stake in these sorts of exchanges may have little, if anything, to do with women themselves. Rather, what is at stake may simply be linked to the visceral pleasures of cracking jokes, of lightening the mood in an otherwise frustrating set of circumstances, and of connecting with others who are enduring similar personal hardships—it’s an exchange that is “intended to entertain rather than to damage” (1997, 1). Of course, as Kelley (1997) also argued, the fact that the target of the men’s humor was a perceived disconnect between men and women is not unrelated to how heteropatriarchy is discursively reproduced in this urban setting by a group of marginalized men. But the fact that the men taking part in the exchange were primarily raised in single-mother households; that they interacted daily with a workforce comprised almost exclusively of women;⁹ and that they openly pined for female companionship also suggests a deeper layer of appreciation for the vital roles that women play in their lives—an appreciation that is seldom acknowledged in stereotypical portrayals of these men as both emasculated economic failures and, paradoxically, as hypermasculine violent offenders (Koch, Scherer, and Holt 2018).

We must, therefore, and with caution, further theorize the potentially generative properties that are also associated with these exchanges for a group of young men entrenched in a context with limited opportunities for romantic relationships, and where the normalization of neoliberalism as a ‘whole way of life’ has consistently eroded other opportunities for intimacy and for community belonging. For example, a few days following the August-24 hockey game discussed earlier, JK met up with Logan—an outreach worker from the HRC who had also witnessed the van ride banter between Andy and the other men of Friday hockey. Logan provided the following alternative interpretation of the exchange:

Logan:

I actually dig those types of conversations. Andy takes himself so seriously. Playing hockey and chatting with the other guys about his relationship is important. It helps him to contextualize himself, right? I’m not saying it’s all good, man, but just think about all of that negative energy Andy brings into a relationship if he doesn’t learn to laugh off common misunderstandings—if he leaves thinking he’s the only one struggling with relationships! Relationships are tough! And when you’ve been made to feel alone your whole life, you can end up internalizing everything. He’s scared, right? Conversations like these help him to verbalize his anxiety and let him know that we’re all here for him if things go sideways. Every Friday, we’re here. (Personal communication, May 9, 2012)

For Logan, the act of expressing and, ultimately, experiencing solidarity with a group of other young men who were enduring similar life circumstances was at the heart of the aforementioned commentary. Logan conceded that there were certainly drawbacks and contradictions associated with discussing ‘women’ as a source of anxiety, but he nevertheless considered these secondary to the healing that Andy sorely longed for in order to put his personal struggles into perspective while contextualizing his romantic insecurities within a broader frame of reference that was inclusive of his personal and social life histories. Indeed, as Pierre Bourdieu (1999, 629) explained in his postscript to Weight of the World:

Producing awareness of these mechanisms that make life painful, even unlivable, does not neutralize them; bringing contradictions to light does not resolve them. But. . .one has to acknowledge the effect it can have in allowing those who suffer to find out that their suffering can be imputed to social causes and thus to feel exonerated; and in making generally known the social origin, collectively hidden, of unhappiness in all its forms, including the most intimate, the most secret.

Michael Messner’s (1992) study of the role of sport in shaping masculinity observed a somewhat different paradox concerning how many young men viewed competitive sporting environments. On the one hand, many embraced sports as a vehicle for connecting with other young men; and yet, on the other hand, they were also socialized to view intimacy as a distinctly gendered threat to their personal autonomy and sense of masculine individuality, both of which, Messner argued, were cultivated through exposure to competitive, physical sporting environments in which men are routinely hierarchized according to their athletic accomplishments and/or skillsets. In contrast to these observations, the men we encountered in Edmonton’s city center were anything but shy or ambivalent about expressing their desire for relationships. The majority of participants outwardly longed for meaningful connections with any individual with whom they could experience closeness, and especially with women. In this sense, they placed more value in nurturing their personal relationships with others rather than concerning themselves with their individual sporting accomplishments or achievements. Sport was, in this setting, not conceived of solely as a vehicle to distinguish men from other men, but was deployed principally as a vehicle to build relationships with other participants and to experience solidarity with those enduring similar life circumstances.

Concluding Remarks

In this article, we have explored how networks of socially beneficial labor, solidarity, care, and support exist at the fringes of Edmonton’s neoliberal city among a group of men experiencing homelessness and at a unique sporting site. These men, who were otherwise ‘down on their luck’, came together each week through the sport of floor hockey to nurture community and companionship among one another; to offer guidance and perspective through life’s various hardships; and to express love, laughter, and solidarity in the face of deprivation and loneliness. Moreover, they derived such value in their weekly sporting rituals that they fought to protect it from ‘outsiders’ and, in the end, envisioned it as an organic resource of hope. As one participant explained,

Allan:

It’s an awareness that it’s [hockey] there for you—that it’s always there and it’s gotta stay consistent so people know that they can count on it like a friend. It’s like knowing you can count on a friend and that he’s gonna be there for you; that you can go and talk to when you need it. That’s what hockey offers us. Let’s call it commitment . . . ‘cause you’re committed to helping others, you know, and they know that it’s there. That’s what it offers . . . that’s what that service offers to a lot of people, is knowing that helping hand is always there for you, you know? (Personal communication, May 9, 2012)

Friday hockey, however, has been radically transformed in recent years, despite the enduring efforts of Wesley to maintain it. When Wesley’s superiors in the Government of Alberta learned of the nonprofit HWP operating in Edmonton’s city center, they decided to end the Friday hockey program. The HWP was, of course, subsequently invited to create a new program without government funding. After over two decades of operating Friday hockey, Wesley’s involvement was terminated, a decision that devastated those in the program. In so doing, moreover, the Government of Alberta mitigated the responsibility of floor hockey onto the nonprofit system, reflecting the broader trend of offloading the state’s traditional responsibilities at arms-length onto nonprofits, businesses, volunteers, and individuals. The new HWP hockey program required less of the state’s resources, but “privatizing responsibility” (Ilcan 2009) meant that Friday hockey would be less secure and would also require more work from precariously employed contract workers.

Rylan, the coordinator of the HWP, believed that the continuity of a weekly floor hockey program was vital for the well-being of Friday hockey participants and became the steward of floor hockey. But the HWP had significantly less staff, no floor hockey equipment, no gymnasium, and no funding whatsoever. Following a competitive application process, however, the HWP was awarded a modest amount of funding by an Alberta charity to cover initial startup costs. The funding was announced on 14 January 2014, and in partnership with the Boyle Street Community League, floor hockey re-started 10 days later at a newly built community center in downtown Edmonton, instead of the psychiatric hospital in north Edmonton. Friday afternoons were chosen to ensure a level of continuity with the original program.

Still, there have been innumerable challenges. First, the community center lacks showers, and participants now return to Edmonton’s inclement weather drenched in sweat. Second, since the HWP facilitated hockey but did not officially rent the space due to budget limitations, other renters—who paid more—take precedence. The program, thus, is no longer offered as consistently as it once used to be. Third, instead of providing all participants with gym clothing and hockey gear, the modest startup grant allowed Rylan to purchase a small number of running shoes and equipment (e.g., hockey sticks), but some players now bring their own shoes, sticks, and other equipment: a costly expense for most players.

Perhaps the most significant change, though, has been the loss of free transportation to and from the games. Participants are now required to make their own way to floor hockey for a two-hour game at the community center, while patients at the hospital (and staff) no longer take part. However, the centralized location has also expanded the reach of the floor hockey program. Now, anyone can drop in—to participate, or just to watch—and they can come and go as they please; some bring their partners, children, or other friends. The relative privacy once enjoyed by participants has, as a result, been difficult to maintain, and many longstanding players have dropped-out, thus raising questions about the program’s continued ability to afford safety for all.

The new games also have a 10-minute break in the middle, used by many of the players as a chance to talk and smoke outside, and to mingle. But these short breaks do not provide the same opportunities for more meaningful, intimate, and therapeutic group conversations such as those that regularly occurred in Wesley’s van. The men now tend to create smaller cliques within the broader social space of the hockey program to address issues that were once discussed collectively with input from the other players and also, crucially, from Wesley. Displays of support, solidarity, and care continue to happen in this new social setting, but they now occur on a much smaller scale, and in more privatized factions.

The program, moreover, remains in constant precarity. The small amount of startup funding was quickly exhausted, a development that was eased by Boyle Street Community League’s decision to waive the HWP’s already discounted rental fees, at a cost of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Then, in March 2018, without consultation, the City of Edmonton terminated Boyle Street Community League’s lease at the community center for not running the building in an efficient manner and for not staying financially solvent (Simons 2018). Prioritizing the needs of the working class, those experiencing homeless, and the floor hockey participants over budget shortfalls was not acceptable in the neoliberal city.

Still, when Boyle Street Community League lost its lease, its leadership ensured the organization assuming control of the gym, the YMCA, would honor the agreement to provide the gym to the HWP for free. While this relationship continues, it faces no shortage of uncertainty, and funding is dependent on the benevolence of several branches of the nonprofit sector, different levels of government, charitable organizations, local businesses, and community support. The players themselves, moreover, continue to negotiate changes to a city that puts mounting pressure on them to rely on no one but themselves and, increasingly, the under-resourced nonprofit sector. For now, however, weekly floor hockey still provides respite and hope, and a community-based alternative to the unforgiving terrain of the neoliberal city.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

ORCID iDs

Jordan Koch

Rylan Kafara

Notes

Author Biographies

Jordan Koch is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education at McGill University.

Jay Scherer is a professor in the faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta.

Rylan Kafara is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta.

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