Participation and the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities through sport: A critical realism perspective
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Date
2025-10
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
This dissertation critically examines the processes, structures, and generative mechanisms shaping social inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities (PWID)i within Special Olympics (SO) programming. While existing research on disability sport frequently highlights participation rates, psychosocial benefits, and affective outcomes, far less attention has been paid to the systemic power dynamics, governance structures, and global inequalities that mediate the inclusion experience. Addressing this gap, the study asks two central research questions: (1) How does participation in Special Olympics promote the social inclusion of PWID in sport settings and broader societal contexts? and (2) How and why do barriers to social inclusion exist in Special Olympics?
The study employed a multi-site global ethnography across four Special Olympics contexts—Canada, Zimbabwe, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany— combining participant observation, stakeholder interviews, and field notes. Grounded in a Critical Realism (CR) ontological framework and operationalizing the Wicked Problems Matrix (WPM), the study advances a multi-layered analysis of inclusion across four ontological domains: material, ideal, artifactual, and social.
Findings reveal that while Special Olympics promotes public visibility and ceremonial inclusion, inclusion remains highly stratified, contingent, and deeply shaped by global power asymmetries, institutional paternalism, embedded ableism, neoliberal governance, and postcolonial dependency structures. The analysis demonstrates that inclusion is not merely a matter of access or participation, but a contested field of power relations where agency, voice, and governance authority remain limited for PWID.
Theoretically, the dissertation advances the application of CR and the WPM as integrated tools for investigating complex institutional challenges in disability sport studies, offering an alternative to positivist and purely interpretivist models that dominate current inclusion research. Methodologically, it contributes a novel cross-domain application of CR combined with global ethnography, producing new insights into how inclusion is simultaneously enacted and constrained across diverse national contexts.
The study concludes that inclusion within Special Olympics is best understood as a very wicked problem, requiring not only programmatic reform but structural rethinking of global governance, leadership, and the epistemologies that underpin disability sport. Without critical interrogation of these generative mechanisms, efforts at inclusion risk reproducing the very inequalities they aim to redress.