I left Denmark at the beginning of august 2019 to investigate how recruitment of young boys was practised at a Danish football academy in Uganda. I aimed to critically engage with as many people who were related to the recruitment process, not so much to clarify a specific practice, but I was more interested in creating perspectives on children’s rights from a critical ethnographic approach. As an ethnographer, a critical ethnographer, I did not seek to distance myself from my work. I deliberately involved myself as much as possible through an activist style where I did not avoid confrontations or discussions. I tried to do so with Ugandan and Danish academy coaches, scouts, staff members, volunteers and the director of El Cambio Academy. This project departure from a posthumanism position and was inspired by different philosophers mainly Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who affected me and the project to practise and write research differently.
I tried to experiment with styles of writings. I used texts and writing as an active element where new thoughts could evolve. I lived in Uganda the past eleven out of eighteen months, and the more time I was there, the more I experienced the struggle of making the familiar strange. I think my confrontational ethnographic work could be interpreted as some kind of wrestling with things that slowly had become familiar, which I thought forever would be strange to me. This wrestle caused many dilemmas during the fieldwork, where I constantly select my actions because I imagined myself as a responsible researcher. Being in the middle of an academy that recruits boys from they are seven years old will forever be problematic when it is thought with a children’s rights principles - because who or what is the top priority? I do not provide a single answer, because it is far more complicated when many different actors get involved, but what I argue is that there could be a potentially different and better future for children related to academies.
A better future where families and children from Uganda no longer are taken advantage of by international football academies who are there with a cover story of humanism.