Conference Agenda

In China, long-standing disparities between urban and rural areas are evident due to uneven economic development (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2024). As a result, large numbers of rural workers migrate to cities in search of better employment and income opportunities. However, the Chinese household registration system (Hukou) classifies residents as either urban or rural, and those with rural Hukou are unable to access the same social welfare benefits in cities, such as healthcare and education, even after moving there (Hu, 2017). As such, many rural parents who migrate to cities for work leave their children behind in rural areas under the care of relatives or close friends, which has given rise to a youth population that has come to be known as ‘left-behind children’. Left-behind children are broadly defined as those under the age of 16 whose parents, or at least one parent, work away from home for an extended period, while the children remain in their registered Hukou location under the care of others (Pan & Ye, 2009). While estimates of the number of left-behind children in China vary considerably depending on data sources, the population is widely understood to number in the millions, with estimates as high as around 61 million (Bian et al., 2025).

Existing research on left-behind children has largely focused on the risks and deficits they face compared with their non-left-behind peers, including in relation to academic achievement, physical and psychological health and wellbeing, and social behaviour. For example, some studies indicate that left-behind children tend to exhibit lower average levels of mental health, well-being and academic achievement than their non-left-behind peers (e.g., Jin et al., 2020). However, it has been suggested that such deficit perspectives may inadvertently reinforce the stigmatisation of left-behind children, negatively influencing their perceptions of personal competence and self-worth (Mu, 2018). Moreover, they may marginalise left-behind children’s voices by failing to adequately recognise the diversity of their lived experiences and their capacity for agency (Bian et al., 2025).

PE and school sport have been widely recognised as having the potential to promote young people’s positive development (e.g., Bailey et al., 2009). In particular, PE and school sport can provide valuable opportunities for marginalised young people to develop positive relationships and social networks, thereby supporting the accumulation of social capital and enhancing resilience, emotional well-being, and mental health (e.g., Sandford et al., 2023). However, as a recent study by Bian et al. (2025) demonstrates, within the field of PE and school sport, the perspectives of left-behind children remain largely absent. Moreover, much of the existing research on left-behind children has relied on statistical indicators or adult interpretations, with comparatively limited attention paid to how left-behind children themselves experience and make sense of PE and school sport. In light of the developmental potential of PE and school sport, particularly for marginalised youth, there is a need for more in-depth research that attends to the PE and school sport experiences of left-behind children in China.

Building on this, this study focuses on left-behind children’s perspectives and experiences of PE and school sport, and explores how these contexts may support left-behind children’s positive development. By placing children’s voices, perspectives and lived experiences at the centre of the research, this study seeks to move beyond a deficit perspective and to offer a more nuanced understanding of left-behind children’s realities. Theoretically, the study draws on insights from Bourdieu (1977, 1985), particularly the interrelated concepts of field, capital and habitus, to understand the complexity of left-behind children’s experiences within PE and school sport.

A growing number of young people are attending alternative provision schools. In England, where this research was situated, state‑funded alternative provision catered for over 16,000 pupils in the 2024/25 academic year, with a further 27,880 in school‑arranged alternative provision (DfE, 2025a). Alternative provision is often stigmatised as somewhere only the very worst behaved pupils go, yet these settings support a wide range of children and young people who arrive with complex needs and vulnerabilities and would otherwise not receive suitable education due to illness, behavioural issues or histories of adversity (House of Commons Education Committee, 2018). In line with broader trends of increasing school exclusions (DfE, 2025b), the role of alternative provision in re‑engaging and better including young people in education has come under increased research focus (Thomson & Pennacchia, 2014).

Whilst PE is often assumed to have the potential to support young people’s social and emotional learning including by helping them manage stress, control impulses, resolve conflicts peacefully and respect themselves and others (Hooper et al., 2020; Wright, et al., 2021), little consideration has been given to how it is actually experienced within alternative provision, especially from the perspectives of pupils themselves. Indeed, while a small number of emerging studies have begun to foreground PE in these contexts (see, Maher et al., 2025a, 2025b, 2025c; Quarmby et al., 2025), there is currently no literature centring young people’s own accounts of their PE experiences. This paper therefore aims to fill this gap and is two‑fold in its purpose: first, to spotlight the voices of pupils from alternative provision schools and illuminate their lived experiences of PE; and second, to share the messy realities of conducting research in such settings.

To achieve this, we adopted narrative inquiry, positioned within an interpretivist research paradigm, characterised by ontological relativism and epistemological constructionism (Smith, 2016; Smith & McGannon, 2018). We explicitly reject the notion that pupils’ PE experiences exist ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered; instead, we view knowledge about those experiences as a shared endeavour between young people, and us, as researchers. This philosophical position aligns with our methodological choice to use ethnodrama to (re)present pupils’ stories.

Ethnodrama communicates the results of data as a written play or theatrical script, foregrounding interactions between those involved in a specific encounter (Book et al., 2024). It offers outsiders a way to “enter into the inner sanctum of a group” (Block & Weatherford, 2013, p. 510) and allows narrative researchers to present personal truths rather than ‘the truth’ (Monforte & Smith, 2023). This creative form of representation can show layers of lived experience, emotion and theory (McMahon, 2016), and is particularly valuable in contexts where young people’s experiences are complex, varied and deeply relational. Our aim in using ethnodrama, therefore, is to illuminate the realities of those attending alternative provision and to reveal convergent and divergent perspectives on PE.

Outdoor Adventure Education - Students' Encounters with Nature

Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE) has emerged as a model aimed at facilitating students’ personal growth through outdoor experiences (Williams and Wainwright, 2015). The model has been criticized for its instrumental use of outdoor activities solely for personal development, and for its limited emphasis on nature and issues of sustainability (Leirhaug & Abelsen, 2024). The model has been described as sportified outdoor life, a “fast and furious” postmodern form, characterized by the emphasis on adventure and risk in the model (Gelter, 2010).

The aim of this study is to further develop the OAE model within a Scandinavian context, by incorporating a stronger focus on students’ encounters with nature. Our study is based on an action research project conducted together with 4^th graders (9–10-year-old children) and their’ teacher. In our project, risks pertain specifically to everyday activities and natural environments that children encounter in Western-Norway rather than to risk assessment within activities associated with the sportification of friluftsliv. The research question guiding this paper is: “What characterizes the students’ encounters with nature?”

The Outdoor Education Model

Williams and Wainwright’s (2015) identify four non-negotiable features of a pedagogical model for OAE. The first feature is that the teaching should be conducted mainly outdoors, with some exceptions i.e. indoor climbing. The second feature is that the learning process should be experiential. The third feature is that students should be challenged by choice. The last essential feature implies that the students should learn risk management.

Encounters with nature

Encounters with nature are an important dimension in Scandinavian friluftsliv. Outdoor education researchers emphasize that what kind of relationship students develop with nature is influenced by the purposes of teaching (Freeman et al., 2021; Sandell et al., 2003). They stress that teaching with narrow purposes might facilitate instrumental relationships to nature. In contrast, facilitating direct encounters with nature without specific purposes is presented as an ideal because here, nature is given a value on its own and students’ experiences of nature are the basis of the learning process.

Researchers do also argue that direct encounters with nature might develop students’ desire to take care of nature and more environmentally friendly attitudes and behavior (Sjödin, 2024; Løvoll & Sæther, 2022; Sandell & Öhman, 2013). It's argued that direct encounters with nature can create a sense of belonging and identification with nature (Tordsson, 2003).

The aim of the paper is to explore and map the ebbs and flows of movement and joy among transgender (trans) youth. That is, how is joy of movement embodied in the experiences of trans youth? In other words, I aim to trace the intra-actions of trans-movement-joy. The research presented in this paper was conducted within the Graduate School: Sustainable Movement Education (SMOVE).

Even if my focus is on joy, there is a need to understand the marginalization of trans youth and its extent. This is because marginalization and oppression affect joy; how, where, and when it can appear, and how it is experienced. In terms of school, previous research depicts it as governed by institutionalized cisnormativity and heteronormativity, and as unsafe spaces for trans pupils, spaces that expose them to mistreatment, verbal and physical harassment by peers or teachers, as well as neglect or bias in educational materials (Devís-Devís et al., 2018; McBride, 2021; Schmitt, 2023; Vindhol Evensen et al., 2025). Here, the subject ‘physical education’ (PE) in particular, (re)produces the heteronormative system and heteronormative binarism that creates multiple forms of exclusion and rejection, among them the abjection of gender nonconforming individuals (Devís-Devís et al., 2018). Also, in sport and exercise spaces, trans exclusion is prevalent (Larsson & Auran, 2024; Perez-Samaniego et al., 2019; Storr et al., 2022). Here, trans people must employ social change strategies to participate, that is, to take responsibility for their own inclusion, or rather includability (Auran et al., 2025; Kavoura et al., 2022). A crucial aspect of trans exclusion is its bodily or material nature. It is an exclusion that is not mainly about participation; rather, it is about one´s own materiality, one’s own body as real, that is, it is a question of who and what constitutes a legitimate human (Auran et al., 2025; Braidotti, 2019; Butler, 2004).

Despite all this misery, there are positive sides in trans people’s lives, and there are ‘in-between’ spaces. Shuster and Westbrook (2024) argue that there is a need for more research on joy. They explain that there is an overfocus on the negative in the lives of marginalized groups, which creates what they call a ‘joy deficit’. This results in a one-sided story about marginalized people’s lives that reproduces oppression by creating a narrative of misery, a narrative that both obscures joy and the livable life. This is not to say that the oppression of trans people is not very real, but there are other things happening as well.

In this article, my focus is on movement and joy, in other words, joy as bodily felt in its intra-action with the world. I employ the Baradian (2007) theoretical schema of agential realism to trace the intra-actions of trans-movement-joy. Central to this schema is that matter is not static or a blank canvas; it is not a thing, but a process of becoming. Thus, matter and meaning are created in its material-discursive entanglement with the world (Barad, 2007). To understand how meanings come to matter, Barad employs the concept of diffraction. Diffraction refers to the bending of light waves (Barad, 2007). Diffraction can be described as a means of identifying the effects of these differences. That is, when or where differences matter (Haraway, 1992). I use diffraction as an overarching method that helps the understanding and handling of the ‘empirical data’, from the study design to the analysis. Additionally, the diffractive method provides a process-oriented approach, giving time and room for details, complexities, and contradictions, rather than falling into the pregiven, appealing to simple causal relationships or (re)producing (Barad, 2014; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017).