Thinking through making and doing: sport science as an art of inquiry

How best to summarise the professional work of sport scientists? What if we were to view them as artisans? As enskiled crafts-persons who think through and with their materials? What implications would this idea have for how we take up with research and ensuing scientific methods? Here, we explore these philosophical questions–of applied relevance–through Ingold’s process of making. From this perspective, skilled artisans like potters, basket-makers and sport scientists, think through making and doing, as opposed to make and do through thinking. Where the latter imposes form onto matter by way of conceptualisation, the former goes along with materials in active participation, corresponding with what such things have to say with a skilled attentiveness and selective responsiveness. We argue that the implications of these propositions for research in sport science are profound; encouraging a progression from the traditional hypothetico-deductive theory of scientific method (make and do through thinking), towards an art of inquiry (think through making and doing). In the former, phenomena are studied about, (re)producing categorical (sub-)disciplinary knowledge by way of vertical integration, while in the latter, phenomena are studied with, growing storied knowledge of by way of correspondence. These arguments are not to be construed as a call for more ‘qualitative research’ within the sport sciences, but rather to underline the value of situating participant observation at the core of one’s inquiry. Through a prologue and epilogue, we exemplify our arguments in the very process of this paper’s becoming–detailing the careful attentiveness and selective responsiveness to the various invitations to write, emergent while thinking through making and doing.