Tobias Arenz studied education, history and sport science at the German Sport University Cologne (DSHS), where he has been working as a research assistant since 2014 and finished his PhD in 2019. His work on "Die Spur der Gesellschaft. Reflexionen zur Gesellschaftstheorie nach Luhmann" won the DSHS Young Researcher Award for the best dissertation in the category social sciences and was published by Velbrück Wissenschaft in 2020. He is particularly interested in communal sense as a political expression challenging our sense of freedom. Communal sense can only exist with freedom, just like freedom can only exist with communal sense.
Click here to go to Tobias Arenz's profile page at the German Sport University Cologne.
Communal Sense in Sport
The success stories of sport as a part of society, especially from sport in school, in clubs, or as a leisure activity, are present to us every day. Together we share excitement, cheer on athletic records and improvements, and are disappointed with defeats. Everyone cares about sport, be it in its local developments, but also in its global form and everyone should be able to be active in and help shape sports in every place on earth. At the same time, every engagement faces the boundaries of sports if it only emphasizes accomplishments and success, disregarding physical and psychological integrity, falling into blind addiction to records or excluding people and sportive styles. It is "not better or worse than the order of society where it stems from and for which it represents a compensation" (Helmut Plessner, quote freely translated by the translator of this website).
When we want to know what threatens communal sense in sport and what we can do for it, we need to always have the question of the society we live in at hand as well. By researching communal sense we also want to contribute to the discourse about which type of sport can exist in our society or which type of sport we want. Crtical for us is olympic sport, which with its charta shaped an institution of constitutional value, which invokes everyone to help building a confident lifestyle, a "philosophy of life" (Olympic Charter, Fundamental Principle No. 1), which means to meet each other peacefully, dignified, exemplary, and responsibly in sportive competitions.
Thus our leading questions are: What means communal sense in sport? How can it be practically implemented into the educative fields of sport? What can especially sports as a mirror to and school of society do for society? We are seeking answers in the interdisciplinarily oriented sciences of sport as well as in the various practices of sport in order to achieve influential connections towards each other. This approach is framed by the goal of the main project, to shape the perspective for all the individuals using communal sense, who contribute to a societal interaction.