We are pleased to invite you to the Just Turn Up: informal sport and social participation in the superdiverse city end of project event taking place on November 20, 2024 from 11:30 am - 3:30 pm.

This two year Economic and Social Research Council funded research project has examined how and in what ways informal sport activities in everyday city spaces generate forms of social interaction and urban belonging in super-diverse communities in London and Sheffield. 

Since October 2023 members of  the project team have been spending time hanging out with informal sport participants ranging from urban walking and migrant women’s yoga groups to basketball and ecuavolley players. Alongside doing this we have talked to local, regional and national policy makers, think tanks, service providers, community groups and organisations working in sport, urban planning, migration support, health and wellbeing, community and social inclusion. The team have also worked with a London based poet (Grace Atkinson) and a Sheffield based poet (Dami Okhiria) to engage with participants and to creatively capture the project’s activities.

The end of project event will be an opportunity for the project team (Sarah Neal, Clare Rishbeth, Rana Aytug, Andres Sierra Martinez, all University of Sheffield; Bonnie Pang, University of Bath and Keith Parry, Bournemouth University) to share the project’s findings; to hear from the two poets about their creative work with us on the project; to bring together a range of policy and community stakeholders (including members of our Project Advisory Group) for roundtable discussions and to engage in wider interactive dialogue and knowledge exchange.

We very much hope you can join us.

Please RSVP via Eventbrite by 7th November, 2024

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1042077781697?aff=oddtdtcreator 

For any further inquiries, please contact:

Sarah Neal: s.neal@sheffield.ac.uk 

Rana Aytug: r.aytug@sheffield.ac.uk 

We attended the interdisciplinary conference, Un/Building the Future: The Country and the City in the Anthropocene held at the University of Warwick in June 2023.  Rana Aytug presented our project and our early findings.  The interdisciplinary theme of the conference appealed to us given its concern with current environmental trajectories and the future of our cities.  Our presentation acknowledged urban public spaces, such as parks, as invaluable local and social assets serving local communities and the city at wide while also addressing that the sustainability of these spaces is being challenged by a range of issues such as unequal access, funding and management of green spaces.