Between laughter and effort. An analysis of the physical and emotional engagement of migrants in sports associations in France and Germany

Voluntary organisations in several European countries have developed numerous sports programmes in the wake of the ‘European Refugee Crisis of 2015–2016’. In the space of ten years, these programmes have gone from being rare, original and innovative to being relatively widespread practices whose values are widely recognised by national and European institutions. Initial research on the policy objectives and impact of these sport programmes highlighted the diversity of these types of organisations and their policy objectives. Drawing on Elias’s sociological theory of social figurations, this article examines the ways in which refugees conform to, submit to, or appropriate political categorisations in sport activities. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in French and German sports associations, the findings show that refugees internalise a tension between the pleasure dimension of sport and efforts to integrate culturally and professionally into their past and present relational and (trans)national networks. The article concludes that sporting configurations give rise to a sociogenesis of emotions that reflect the macro-sociological tensions at work in the political categorisation of refugees in France and Germany.