Running together to explore the city: How foreigners discover the city through experiences of a sports group
How do foreigners, who come to Luxembourg for work, discover the city through sport? This is one of the questions asked during ethnographic research focusing on a sports group in two research organisations employing a large percentage of foreigners.
The inductive approach of grounded theory was developed for the exploration of the working migrants’ sensitive experience of integration into the new country. The concepts of interaction and integration, borrowed from the Chicago School, were the theoretical tools for analysis of the data collected through observations, interviews, and maps of the working environments. The article discusses the integration of its members into the city, as well as their interaction with the spaces outside their work in various degrees and explores how, through the sports group at work, foreigners working in the country discover places that are otherwise limited to outside of their working space. The analysis concludes by showing how running in/with the group serves as a medium through which people interact with the city and its history and build their own story in the city.
- Sports group
- work
- migrant
- integration
- urban space
- running