Love Fighting Hate Violence: Engaging people in academic projects with emotion
The Love Fighting Hate Violence (LFHV) campaign is built upon academic research that highlights both the damaging consequences and potential positive outcomes embedded in combat sports.
This academic foundation, although offering a solid platform from which to build, is limited in its ability to bring about the positive social changes that are central to the campaign’s manifesto. To understand why this is the case, we need look no further than the emotive language that we use within the campaign’s title, and the problems this often poses to academic work.
Using emotional language
Emotional terms such as ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are seldom deployed in academic research, writing or teaching. The legacy of detached, objective science means that the use of such language is largely ruled out. In conforming to this academic norm, scholars hope to demonstrate that their research is isolated from emotional attachments and the ‘biases’ these might involve. While this can be considered an important element of the scientific method, it does not capture the realities of human life more broadly. Indeed, this process obscures the passions and emotions that often compel social scientists to do research to begin with.
As an active researcher, I can certainty attest to this process as I have been driven to explore social worlds and behaviours that I am emotionally connected to in various ways. Furthermore, while teaching I have found that drawing on students’ emotional connections to topics has often resulted in the most effective learning experiences. The emotions are one of the ways in which human beings understand and engage in the world. And in failing to draw on emotional experiences and embrace emotive terminology, the detached world of academia often sits apart from this manner of engaging people.
Love Fighting Hate Violence
With LFHV, Alex Channon and I chose to develop a project that moves beyond the traditional ways that academic ideas are presented and, as such, this has enabled us to draw upon emotional terminology and experiences. This is evident in the title of the campaign, which is not only a snappy and easily recognisable phrase, but also uses the moral meanings of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ to communicate the central ideas of LFHV in a powerful manner. We have found that those involved in combat sports are drawn to this emotional language as it ‘make sense’ when considered alongside their experiences of both fighting and violence. This is one way in which we have been successful in engaging people with the central features of the campaign and with it, the more abstract and detached findings of our academic research.
While we have had some success in ‘translating’ our research in this manner to those who are involved in combat sports, this does rely on some pre-existing level of (emotional) experience and connection to such social worlds. Therefore, a further step is to help those who do not share our love of fighting to begin to understand these experiences as a ‘way in’ to the key messages of the campaign. Therefore, in this post I want to discuss what I personally love about boxing, and along the way I will make some links to my research on the topic.
A fight of mine back in 2017.
My personal experiences
I love moving around. I love learning to move around more effectively and efficiently. I love the feeling of my body getting better at doing stuff, whether that be running, lifting weights or becoming more agile. These loves have unsurprisingly resulted in me being involved in a variety of sports and physical activities throughout my life. While studying at university I tried boxing for the first time, and since that point I have (mostly) loved my participation in the sport. Now, some 10 years on, I have lost track of how many boxing clubs I have trained at and conducted research within. During this time I have spoken with countless boxers who all shared elements of my love for the sport.
Together, we love the feeling of getting better at the skills and tactics of boxing; we love the feeling of our muscles burning during fitness drills and the fatigue after a hard training session; we love turning up at the gym and hanging out with our training partners; we love the feeling of getting stronger, more powerful, and quicker; we love the feeling of defending a punch, or landing one just right; we love look after ourselves, and the cooperative, caring and competitive sides of sparring; we love the feeling of making new boxers feel welcome; we love the way boxing helps young people interact with adults; we love the way boxing can help give direction to those who need it; and we love the way boxing clubs can be positive spaces in community life. All these elements and many more fit within what we define within the LFHV campaign as ‘fighting’: respectful, consenting, physical competition, designed to bring out the best in those who care to take part. And this is why I, and many people, can say we love fighting.
It is the love of these dimensions of boxing that have motivated me to continuing participating in, and do research on, the sport. But this love is also what underpins my motivation to write about some of the more damaging aspects of the sport, including those elements of boxing that we can think about as violent; the elements that we can quite rightfully hate. This research has largely focused on the symbolic, material and personal violations that occur within the sport. In this sense, I hate the fact that some boxers feel they have no option but to sacrifice their bodies for the sake of competition; I hate that some boxers consent to take part in boxing without fully understanding the effects that long-term participation can have on their health; I hate that some boxers and their coaches bully others, or see boxing as a space where they can demean or insult people; I hate that some boxing gyms exclude people from taking part, and help construct and maintain barriers between different groups and individuals. These are some of the violences that I hate, and it is this emotional connection that underpins my motivation to study such issues and, through the LFHV campaign, try to stop them.
Bringing the emotions back
So while I am cautious with using the terms ‘love’ and ‘hate’ within my academic publications, these emotions are in fact quite important to my academic projects – as, I would argue, they are for all scholars in some shape or form. And in using these terms as central features of the LFHV campaign, Alex and I hope to go further than our previous research and writing on the topic has enabled us. We hope to draw on the similar emotional experiences of others to bring out a meaningful shift in the way people think and talk about both fighting and violence. And in so doing, the goal is simple; to help encourage the positive dimensions of fighting, while also highlighting and reducing the damaging effects of violence.
This article is based on a lecture I gave at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in August 2016.