Until recently, sport and exercise psychologists have been researching acculturation and its relation with sport and exercise through a lens of universalism and (post)positivism. Using such ontological and epistemological assumptions, researchers have been preoccupied with finding linear patterns that predict the behaviours of immigrants in their new environments without much consideration to historical, sociopolitical and cultural contexts (Chirkov, 2009a). Acculturation, however, is a changing process that is extended over time and revolves within and around specific historical, political and cultural contexts. Considerations from post/anti/decolonial studies maintain that through the western eyes, race and ethnicity have become synonymous for non-white people who have been positioned as different and lesser than their white counterparts (Butryn, 2009). Western scholarship has continued to place this ‘cultural other’ in the margins of the society and in constant need of intervention. Despite a call for rethinking the epistemological understanding of the acculturation and its relation to sport and exercise (Chirkov, 2009b; Ryba & Schinke, 2009), European and Scandinavias sport and exercise psychology has remained unchallenged territory for the most part. This critical overview is a call for decolonizing the knowledge and scholarship within sport and exercise psychology by utilizing transformative approaches that centralize the voices of the cultural ‘other’ and treat them as active agents in the process of knowledge production.

I went to work in the mornings at the construction site carrying heavy irons and bricks, that was hard work. But it was so much fun in the afternoons, we played ‘خردمپایی’, one would throw an old flipflop trying to hit others, we had to be very fast to not get hit! We played for hours. Later when we got older, we, the Afghan kids, turned an old gravel canal into a football field. Those were good times.

While a growing body of scholarship in (forced) migration, sport for development and peace, and community sport development contexts has advocated the use of participatory approaches and innovative methodologies, there is a lack of published empirical research on the complexities and challenges of implementing such approaches in the study of sport, forced migration and settlement. Drawing on the personal experiences of the authors as insider action researchers in two different geographical locations, this study aims to reveal the challenges and opportunities in working within a participatory paradigm. The insight gained through this work may provide practical tool for (sports) researchers and evaluators as well as community members taking up participatory approaches.

In this paper, I aim to disseminate the knowledge that was generated during a participatory art-based action research that I collaborated with a group of young Afghan asylum seekers in Sweden. The focus of the research was the lived experiences of the youth in relation to sport and physical activity. I have chosen a narrative poem which I crafted using vox participare [voices of participants] (Norton & Sliep, 2019) to do this work. In this way I have grounded the dissemination of our research in the shared epistemology of our peoples, the Khorasani peoples of central/western Asia. By adopting the persona of شاعر [the poet](Olszewska, 2015) and by writing in a reflective manner that does not obscure my own privilege, I work towards decolonising the process of research and knowledge generation as it relates to the field of sport. I attempt to show how the Afghan youth re-make sport (and physical activity) in ways that re-create conditions of dignity for themselves and their community in their everyday living. In this way I aim to disrupt the dominant understandings about what sport is, what it is supposed to do and how it can be utilised by those who are living with social injustices.