Adapting Sport Together: Co-Design and Digital Storytelling for Climate Adaptation

Delighted to co-author this paper with two brilliant colleagues and friends from Loughborough University and the Institute for Creative Futures LU London, Valentina Volpi and Ksenija Kuzmina, who will be presenting our paper at the Sport Anthropology Conference 2025, whose theme this year is “Sport Beyond Definitions”.

The paper is inspired and informed by the work we are developing together through participatory digital storytelling and co-design with young people in Bangladesh, Jordan, and Fiji, at the intersection of climate displacement and sport.

You can read our abstract below.

Authors:
Valentina Volpi – School of Design and Creative Arts, Loughborough University, UK.
Ksenija Kuzmina – Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University London, UK.
Antonia Liguori – Institute for Collective Place Leadership, Teesside University, UK.

Title: Adapting Sport Together: Co-Design and Digital Storytelling for Climate Adaptation

Sport exists in tension, and Sport for Development (SfD) operates within this friction: while it seeks to use sport as a context-specific tool for social change, it often remains bound by institutional logic, external funding, and predefined resilience-building models for aid. 

For those developing tools and methods to foster participation through design interventions and digital storytelling workshops, this tension is not just an analytical concern but a methodological challenge, especially in climate-displaced communities. How can we navigate sport’s structures while opening space for capacity building and alternative storytelling? 

Our ongoing research explores how sports actions can be hacked and redesigned, opening spaces where communities critically engage with their pasts and futures beyond imposed scripts. Through participatory digital storytelling and co-design, we are working with young people in Bangladesh, Jordan, and Fiji to examine how traditional and formal activities are repurposed—through movement, play, and team experimentation— to foster adaptive agency, while story-making agency allows participants to construct new narratives beyond resilience frameworks.

Instead of delivering structured solutions, we use sport as a site of trialling, where rules are rewritten, adaptive strategies playtested, and capacities built collectively. By embracing the productive frictions within SfD and unpacking their complexities through storytelling and co-design, this paper explores the following questions: when does sport enable agency, and when does it impose limits? How can we genuinely pass the ball to the players, shifting Sports models to a hacked sports system for critical speculation and climate-adaptive agency?

Keywords: Co-Design; Digital Storytelling; Climate Adaptation.

More information on the INSA Conference 2025 via this link: https://www.sportanthro.org/conference/